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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
For submission guidelines, click here
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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DeLombard, Jeannine. "'Eye-witness to the Cruelty': Literary Abolitionism and the Antebellum Culture of Testimony," Department of English, University of Pennsylvania, August 1998.
Although the testimony of virtually all African-Americans was inadmissible in antebellum courtrooms, literary abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Harriet Jacobs consistently employed in their writing a juridical metaphor which portrayed slavery as a crime, slaves as victims and eyewitnesses, slaveholders as perpetrators and defendants, abolitionists as advocates for the slave, and the American reading public as judge and jury. The culture of testimony that emerged proved at once liberating and confining for African-American authors, who gained a hearing before the national tribunal, but often resisted being (mis)represented by their white advocates in the court of public opinion.
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