In the decades before the Civil War, Americans appealed to the nation's sacred religious and legal texts - the Bible and the Constitution - to address the slavery crisis. The ensuing political debates over slavery deepened interpreters' emphasis on historical readings of the sacred texts, and in turn, these readings began to highlight the unbridgeable historical distances that separated nineteenth-century Americans from biblical and founding pasts. While many Americans continued to adhere to a belief in the Bible's timeless teachings and the Constitution's enduring principles, some antislavery readers, including Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln, used historical distance to reinterpret and use the sacred texts as antislavery documents. By using the debate over American slavery as a case study, Jordan T. Watkins traces the development of American historical consciousness in antebellum America, showing how a growing emphasis on historical readings of the Bible and the Constitution gave rise to a sense of historical distance.

"A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." So reads Noah's curse on his son Ham, and all his descendants, in Genesis 9:25. Over centuries of interpretation, Ham came to be identified as the ancestor of black Africans, and Noah's curse to be seen as biblical justification for American slavery and segregation. Examining the history of the American interpretation of Noah's curse, this book begins with an overview of the prior history of the reception of this scripture and then turns to the distinctive and creative ways in which the curse was appropriated by American pro-slavery and pro-segregation interpreters.

In the first six decades of the nineteenth century, America's biblical and constitutional interpreters waged their hermeneutical battles on historical grounds. Biblical scholars across the antebellum religious spectrum, from orthodox Charles Hodge's Calvinism to heterodox Theodore Parker's Transcendentalism, began to emphasize contextual readings. This development, fueled by an exposure to German biblical criticism and its emphasis on historical exegesis, sparked debate about the pertinence of biblical texts and the permanence of their teachings. In the 1830s, the resurfacing slavery issue increased the urgency to explore the biblical past for answers, which exposed differences between ancient and American slavery. Some still posited the persistence of the Bible as a whole and others rescued a Testament, a text or a teaching, but a few, including Parker, proved willing to let the old canon drift into the past. Slavery bound these arguments to another debate about a historical text from a more recent past. In the 1840s and 1850s, national observers in an expanding political culture focused their attention on the Constitution in hopes of resolving the growing crisis over the peculiar institution. The passing of the founding generation cultivated great interest in founding-era sources and antislavery readers began debating the interpretive importance of publications like Madison's papers (1840). The Fugitive Slave Law (1850), the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), and the Dred Scott decision (1857) further nationalized the issue and put more pressure on constitutional interpreters, who, in turn, scrutinized the founding era for answers. From radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips to southern Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, readers aimed to recover and use the framers' intent to interpret the Constitution. The resulting historical explanations and narrations indicated that much had changed since ratification. Even when antislavery constitutionalists like William Goodell and Lysander Spooner rejected the emphasis on contextual interpretation, their accounts highlighted slavery's presence at the founding and traced the anachronistic rise of the Slave Power since that period. Some upheld the Constitution as a enduring national convention, others read it in light of the Declaration's egalitarian promises, and a few, including Parke, stood ready to dismiss it as outdated.

An analysis of the development of historical consciousness in antebellum America, using the debate over slavery as a case study.

Perhaps no other group of people has been as much formed by biblical texts and tropes as African Americans. From literature and the arts to popular culture and everyday life, the Bible courses through black society and culture like blood through veins. Despite the enormous recent interest in African American religion, relatively little attention has been paid to the diversity of ways in which African Americans have utilized the Bible.African Americans and the Bibleis the fruit of a four-year collaborative research project directed by Vincent L. Wimbush and funded by the Lilly Endowment. It brings together scholars and experts (sixty-eight in all) from a wide range of academic and artistic fields and disciplines--including ethnography, cultural history, and biblical studies as well as art, music, film, dance, drama, and literature. The focus is on the interaction between the people known as African Americans and that complex of visions, rhetorics, and ideologies known as the Bible. As such, the book is less about the meaning(s) of the Bible than about the Bible and meaning(s), less about the world(s) of the Bible than about how worlds and the Bible interact--in short, about how a text constructs a people and a people constructs a text. It is about a particular sociocultural formation but also about the dynamics that obtain in the interrelation between any group of people and sacred texts in general. ThusAfrican Americans and the Bibleprovides an exemplum of sociocultural formation and a critical lens through which the process of sociocultural formation can be viewed.

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, first published in England in 1789, was one of the earliest and remains to this day one of the best-known English language slave narratives. Characterizing Olaudah Equiano's eighteenth-century narrative of his life as a type of ''scriptural story'' that connects the Bible with identity formation, Vincent L. Wimbush's White Men's Magic probes not only how the Bible and its reading played a crucial role in the first colonial contacts between black and white persons in the North Atlantic but also the process and meaning of what he terms ''scripturalization.'' By this term, Wimbush means ''a social-psychological-political discursive structure'' or ''semiosphere'' that creates a reality and organizes a society in terms of relations and communications. This scripturalization, achieved by the British to establish a colonial and racialized society in and through the promotion of literacy and the Bible as a ''fetishized center-object,'' was also performed by an abject outsider or stranger like Equiano through his reading of the Bible as well as his own writing with the goal of imagining and promoting a more inclusive society. It is for this reason that Wimbush calls Equiano's narrative a ''scriptural story,'' and he argues that this is why the talking book trope appears repeatedly in writings of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century black Atlantic writers. Because it is based on the particularities of Equiano's narrative, Wimbush's theoretical work is not only grounded but inductive, and shows that scripturalization is bigger than either the historical or the literary Equiano. Scripturalization was not invented by Equiano, he says, but it is not quite the same after Equiano.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1857. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.

Winner of the Booker Prize A historical novel set in the eighteenth century, Sacred Hunger is a stunning, engrossing exploration of power, domination, and greed in the British Empire as it entered fully into the slave trade and spread it throughout its colonies. Barry Unsworth follows the failing fortunes of William Kemp, a merchant pinning his last chance to a slave ship; his son who needs a fortune because he is in love with an upper-class woman; and his nephew who sails on the ship as its doctor because he has lost all he has loved. The voyage meets its demise when disease spreads among the slaves and the captain's drastic response provokes a mutiny. Joining together, the sailors and the slaves set up a secret, utopian society in the wilderness of Florida, only to await the vengeance of the single-minded, young Kemp.