Freedom's Journal: The First African-American Newspaper Annotated Edition

A book that many scholars will find useful, and one that adds much to our understanding of African American history.

An important book and an essential addition to the library of anyone interested in nineteenth-century African American History.

Bacon has done a masterful job of providing a history of early black rhetoric and writing that gives agency to the African Americans themselves who wrote for, read, distributed, and discussed the paper. Freedom’s Journal is essential reading as it expands our current understanding of the role of rhetoric in early African American politics and culture.

Bacon has written an impressive book about the short-lived Freedom’s Journal, which was published from March 1827 until March 1829. In setting out to address hitherto unanswered questions concerning the purpose of the periodical, the author approaches her material thematically rather than historically. . . . Perhaps the most enlightening chapter in this readable and comprehensive book is the one that explores the rhetoric of gender, particularly the discussion of women as contributors to the publication. . . . Highly recommended.

Bacon’s compellingly written and insightful volume should restore this significant and influential periodical to its proper place in histories about African Americans’ struggles for emancipation and civil rights.

Jacqueline Bacon’s well-written manuscript promises to be a significant contribution to scholarship in African-American history, nineteenth-century reform, and American journalism. This is an important work.

Thanks to Dr. Jacqueline Bacon, we now have an in-depth, scholarly analysis of the first African-American paper which establishes that there was no monolithic black mindset, but rather often competing attitudes about such prevailing, hot-button subjects as the back to Africa movement versus assimilation in the U.S., and gradualism and accommodation versus violent insurrection as the answer to enslavement. . . . This engaging tome is an invaluable teaching tool for the ages.

This book will be valuable to historians of the abolition movement, antebellum America, and race and slavery as well as gender studies. . . . The rich and careful annotation makes this work an excellent sourcebook for scholarship on the early black press and abolition movement.

This fascinating book fits into the current historiography of slavery in giving agency to the African American community….This is a tremendously readable and useful book for scholars.

Works such as this provide a glimpse of the wonder and richness of this chaotic period in American and African American history and revitalize that tenuous connection between the present and the past.