In January of 1861, on the eve of both the Civil War and the rebirth of the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s Christian Recorder, John Mifflin Brown wrote to the paper praising its editor Elisha Weaver: “It takes our Western boys to lead off. I am proud of your paper.” Weaver’s story, though, like many of the contributions of early black literature outside of the urban Northeast, has almost vanished. This book recovers the work of early African American authors and editors such as Weaver who have been left off maps drawn by historians and literary critics. Individual chapters restore to con ... More

In January of 1861, on the eve of both the Civil War and the rebirth of the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s Christian Recorder, John Mifflin Brown wrote to the paper praising its editor Elisha Weaver: “It takes our Western boys to lead off. I am proud of your paper.” Weaver’s story, though, like many of the contributions of early black literature outside of the urban Northeast, has almost vanished. This book recovers the work of early African American authors and editors such as Weaver who have been left off maps drawn by historians and literary critics. Individual chapters restore to consideration black literary locations in antebellum St. Louis, antebellum Indiana, Reconstruction-era San Francisco, and several sites tied to the Philadelphia-based Recorder during and after the Civil War. In conversation with both archival sources and contemporary scholarship, it calls for a large-scale rethinking of the nineteenth-century African American literary landscape. In addition to revisiting such better-known writers as William Wells Brown, Maria Stewart, and Hannah Crafts, the book offers a critical consideration of important figures including William Jay Greenly, Jennie Carter, Polly Wash, and Lizzie Hart. Its discussion of physical locations leads naturally to careful study of how region is tied to genre, authorship, publication circumstances, the black press, domestic and nascent black nationalist ideologies, and black mobility in the nineteenth century.