The introduction takes the author’s hometown, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as a perspective. At the head of the Ohio River, Pittsburgh drew international observers who wished to study industrialization in the nineteenth century. Its rivers, coal, natural gas reservoirs, and oil fields catalyzed a fossil-fuel boom. The introduction illustrates the formation of a new idiom in the lyceums and lecture circuit of the industrial heartland and energy frontier of the Ohio River Valley, from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1851 lectures to Henry Adams’s account of a journey on the Pennsylvania Railroad in The Education of Henry Adams (1907), and of what Adams called “energies quite new.” This chapter provides an overview of energy and economy as contingent ideas. It shows how they raise basic questions about personhood and agency. “Burning Ideas” details a historiography shaped by Pittsburgh’s productive forces, explains the book’s dialectical approach, and concludes with chapter summaries.

Energy is the capacity to perform work, but what is “work”? Examining representations of labor, energy, and race, this chapter considers forms of energy that resist, demand, or may be denied representation. It reads W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction with his poem “The Song of the Smoke,” the legend of John Henry, historiographic debates about African American coal miner and union organizer Richard L. Davis, and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s story of labor conflict, “Shaft 11.” Disagreements between labor historians Du Bois and Abram Lincoln Harris reveal conflicts in historiography and fossil culture. Tensions emerge in competing views of “human capital,” but so does an appreciation for elided energies and lives.

‘Black Athena/Black Athenians’? At the dawning of the Age of ‘European supremacy’, intellectuals preceding Martin Bernal engaged in the reclamation of Africa and its role in the world. This argument takes up these concerns in four sections. Section 14.2 considers Bernal and the work of his predecessors who engaged questions of a diverse and inclusive antiquity that included peoples of African descent. Section 14.3 focuses on Phillis Wheatley and her genius in harnessing classical allusion as a poetic device and revolutionary speech. Section 14.4 focuses on the redefinition and reframing of Egypt and Egyptians, and Ethiopia and Ethiopians in relation to classical discourses and their employment in Black revolutionary conceptualisations from the beginnings of the American Republic through the post-Reconstruction period. In Section 14.5, the overlooked scholarship on antiquity of historically Black colleges and universities is engaged as a marker of the long history of challenges to White supremacy.

This chapter begins by examining America's civic crisis and the failure of civics in K-16, with remedies proposed including the national-consensus approach of the Educating for American Democracy 2021 study and the renewal efforts in higher education, including public university reforms that establish departments of Civic Thought and Leadership. It then turns to three sections: (a) Franklin’s warning and Lincoln’s: America’s crisis and our civics failure; (b) Rediscovering America’s reflective, discursive patriotism; and (c) American Hopefulness and Exemplars Sustaining the Republic (introducing Washington, Douglass, Lincoln, Stanton, Anthony, and King)

This chapter discusses the contested place of the Declaration of Independence in black political thought. As a document that provided a rationale for American independence, the Declaration of Independence in its own way also provided one for black political equality in the United States. This tension between intention and interpretation has made the Declaration stubbornly immune from attack by black intellectuals, politicians, and movement leaders. With rare exception, the Declaration has been attacked mostly for its exclusivity, not its content or core ethos. Even Critical Race Theory’s (CRT) modest dissent from the Declaration has been limited in its ability to transform the persistence of black support for it, making arguments for CRT’s abandonment of America’s founding principles ring hollow. Instead, the history of black political thought from Frederick Douglass to W. E. B. Du Bois to Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, stands squarely on the side of the Declaration’s essential truths, while admonishing America’s enduring failure to live up to them.

Americans’ zeal for mobility intensified after the Civil War, and self-help recipes offered ways to achieve it. But “self-help” is not the same as “self-made,” as Frederick Douglass explained. Many argued that individuals and communities benefit through mutual assistance. People outside of the mainstream who engaged in collective self-help were often undermined by powerful authorities who attacked communal codes. In 1887, federal legislation further dispossessed Native Americans with the Dawes Severalty Act in the name of individualism. In 1892, Pittsburgh’s highly collaborative industrialists suppressed labor organization using their collective resources of law and armed force. Collective self-help was central to African Americans’ efforts to improve their lives despite the weight of discriminatory laws and social bigotry. The motto “Lifting as We Climb” reflected their sense of mutual obligation. Storytellers in the mainstream rebuffed others’ ethos of collective self-help while claiming self-made success for those they championed. "Positive thinkers" such as Dale Carnegie promised success for those who "believed" enough. "Self-made" success was deeply embedded in 1920s culture.

This chapter explores the significance of race for the landscape of genius in relation to the overall racial construction of nature in American society. It focuses on Frederick Douglass’s attempt to establish his own landscape of genius at his estate at Cedar Hill in Ancostia, overlooking Washington DC. Douglass was famous for his genius as an orator and as an abolitionist and civil rights activist. This chapter also demonstrates his deep immersion in nineteenth-century discourses of literary landscape and nature. By seeking to naturalize his genius in the Cedar Hill landscape, Douglass affirmed not only his full cultural citizenship in the nation but also, as a representative figure, the cultural rights and status of all African Americans. Cedar Hill was memorialized after Douglass’s death and eventually became a National Historic Site, but its racial associations disqualified it as “nature” in the dominant White environmental imagination, obscuring this important aspect of Douglass’s identity.

The introduction sets the stage for the chapters to come by offering a brief historical overview of writers’ and scholars’ engagements with whiteness. Starting with Toni Morrison’s insights into the whiteness of the whale in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), this chapter traces an intellectual genealogy that proceeds from what Morrison saw in Melville’s work to what Melville learned from reading Frederick Douglass’s 1845 autobiography. It surveys different kinds of literary treatments of whiteness, more than two centuries of which are treated in this volume, and offers a quick history of the development of whiteness studies before looking ahead to each chapter’s main arguments.

The chapter returns to what has been called the “central paradox of American history,” the ostensible contradiction between this nation’s declared liberal ideals (“all men” being promised the inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) and its sanctioning of slavery, the supreme denial of liberty. It focuses on how antebellum debates (literary, political, and theological) over the moral and political legitimacy of slavery were ultimately debates over “personhood” in order to make clear that the conceptual category of the “person” (the center of liberal thought) needs to be understood as a historically contingent – rather than absolute – identity. Noting how deeply modern accounts of slavery remain indebted to the liberal presumption that slavery is wrong precisely to the extent that those enslaved possess a fixed, transhistorical personhood (a personhood that racism, ideology, or self-interest too often obscures), the chapter seeks to leave behind arguments over the conflict between slavery and liberalism and ultimately asks whether it is possible to imagine a liberatory politics that does not require the “person” to be at its center.

Since the rules of civility are often abandoned for the sake of the goals activists are pursuing, this chapter considers whether these goals – rather than a set of universal rules – might themselves suggest moral constraints. To illustrate this point, I analyze two authors who believe that how one communicates is integrally related to what one actually conveys, and thus morality and effectiveness cannot always be separated. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell argues women must be free to reflect on their own experiences rather than being subjected to authoritative interpretations. Even when done in the name of women’s liberation, telling women how they should feel ironically stifles women’s voices. Thus, a dialogical, consciousness-raising style of communication is integrally related to the pursuit of women’s liberation. Paulo Freire likewise argues that propaganda for the cause of liberation ironically perpetuates oppression. Liberators need to be committed to dialogue because the task of liberation itself demands dialogical engagement.

De Tocqueville helps us see American democracy as a way of life shaped by individualism and a dislike of theatrical display. In John Adams, the ideals of Protestant Christianity and Roman republicanism collided. Adams believed in personal integrity, but was unashamed to perform a social role, inspired by the Roman republican orator Cicero. In the nineteenth century Hugh Blair repositioned rhetoric as a way to speak truth, in a language that in practice confined truth-speaking to the elite. When working-class Irish Americans sought a more inclusive democracy, they found a symbolic representative in the actor Edwin Forrest, and many died in the ensuing riot outside a new opera house in 1849. Black Americans first found a public voice through the person of Frederick Douglass, whose oratory was founded both on preaching and on the old flamboyant republican tradition. Women first demanded a voice in the context of Quakerism and the campaign to abolish slavery. Elizabeth Cady Stanton later argued for female suffrage in terms that were more secular, more individualist and ultimately more elitist.

One of the core themes of Gary Jacobsohn’s work has been his observation that constitutional aspirations tend to develop within a disharmonic constitutional order. Jacobsohn draws our attention to Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass as models for thinking about the unfolding of U.S. constitutional aspirations within a larger framework of constitutional disharmony. This essay revisits Jacobsohn’s theory of constitutional aspiration, including its underlying philosophical premises, and concludes by putting it in dialogue with recent revisionist accounts of the U.S. constitutional order that downplay, deny, or mute the aspirations that Jacobsohn’s body of scholarship highlights and celebrates.

This chapter explores the history of representations of race in the Irish theatre, with a particular focus on blackface and minstrelsy – a discussion which uses at is focal point the pre-histories and afterlives of Dion Boucicault’s 1859 play The Octoroon. That melodrama is resituated within an Irish performance tradition (one that Boucicault himself would have encountered as a young man in Dublin) that stretches from the late nineteenth century, and which involved the performance on Irish stages of African-American characters – whose identity was often juxtaposed with that of stage Irish characters, and often performed by white Irish actors. In such a context, The Octoroon represents a form of continuity with what came before – and must therefore be seen in Irish as well as American contexts. Its impact on subsequent performance histories is also considered, up to and including the staging on the Abbey Theatre stage of An Octoroon – an adaptation of the original play – in 2022.

The complicated relationship between American and European cultural production, particularly in the nineteenth century, is the subject of this chapter. American essayists of this period were, on the one hand, greatly influenced by the literature and culture of Europe and sought to absorb its lessons into their own writing. On the other, these same essayists pushed back against the idea that European writing should be their primary influence. Instead, they frequently critiqued Europe from afar and sought to develop a new idiom and fresh form of expression unique to the United States. Writers like Washington Irving, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Henry James, and Henry David Thoreau explored the many tensions between the United States and Europe in their essays and used them to debate the extent to which America should remain in Europe’s cultural shadow.

This chapter analyzes Black writing from the leadup to the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century, works that shored up the literate voice long denied to enslaved people, and explores how the pre-emancipation essay served to determine freedom. The century’s standout Black orator, Frederick Douglass, became a print phenomenon, advancing a strong first-person voice that spoke for the conscience of the nation. However, it was left to younger writers to tackle the meaning of freedom at a time when emancipation seemed like a hollow promise. The works of activist journalist Ida B. Wells highlight the synergy between investigative reporting and essay writing during the period. The chapter concludes by comparing the prose works of two towering figures: Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. The ideological split in their views on civil rights is registered in their different writing styles, with Washington stressing action and advocacy and Du Bois embracing introspection and contemplation. Between them, these figures register the suite of oratorical, journalistic, and literary resources that will be bequeathed to twentieth-century practitioners of the African American essay.

George Thompson rose to pre-eminence as a lecturer through his work to bring about the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act, and in its aftermath forged the first international anti-slavery movement with colleagues in the United States. As a Garrisonian abolitionist, he was committed to complete and immediate manumission. As a free trader, a member of the Manchester School, he became increasingly interested in how encouraging the development of suitable cotton from the Indian agricultural sector could undermine the power of American cotton planters and thereby nullify the Souths power in the market. His commitments to India included advocating for the deposed Raja of Satara, and attempts to bring down the British East India Company. On his first visit to India, he helped foster institutions that gave young men experience in debate and other forms of advocacy; on his second visit, under the cloud of financial distress following the failure of the Empire newspaper, he served as agent for a British textile firm. In the meantime, he served a term as MP for Tower Hamlets. Witnessing survivors of the Siege of Lucknow embarking in Calcutta, decades of Thompsons political experience came to the fore in a testament of performative empathy, insight, and anti-imperial advocacy.

This chapter tracks the discourse around race, slavery, and racial Blackness in the Americas from the sixteenth century to the present day, with attention to the way the essay form has responded and contributed to the rise of new multiracial societies and struggles for emancipation and abolition. The author discusses how the work of abolitionist writers such as Lemuel Haynes, Ottabah Cugoano, David Walker, and Anna Julia Cooper has informed the subsequent tradition of Black essay writing in the United States and elsewhere.

Traditionally, white radical Republicans like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens have been given the main credit for the work of Reconstruction that culminated with the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments. This chapter shifts the focus to consider the work of Frederick Douglass and other Black activists in contesting the racist president Andrew Johnson and applying pressure to the Republicans to bring about the full citizenship and enfranchisement of African Americans. Douglass had a dramatic 1866 meeting with Andrew Johnson in the White House, and he continued to apply pressure to Johnson and the Republicans over the next several years. The chapter considers some of Douglass’s most important Reconstruction writings, including his essays in the Atlantic Monthly, his great 1867 lecture “Sources of Danger to the Republic,” and the 1881 version of his Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.

While Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) is often described as a private poet and there is no firm evidence that she shared either her fascicle booklets or the great majority of her poems with anyone, there is good evidence that Dickinson drew public attention to herself as a poet from her early years. In this sense, Dickinson was not at all private about her poetry. As a young woman she shared her poems and thoughts about poetry with readers whose response mattered to her, and doing so may have given her the confidence she needed to become the “Emily Dickinson” we know. She also wrote occasional passages of metered prose in her letters of this period – from a few beats to multiple implied lines and rhyme. In the final years of her life, her use of metered prose became more prominent. This essay will focus primarily on the decade during which Dickinson shaped herself as a poet, roughly from the late 1840s to 1858. After a brief review of the years of her greatest productivity, I will pick up my story of Dickinson’s transitions with the 1880s, when she increasingly wrote at this border of poetry and prose. While some aspects of Dickinson’s themes and style changed over her lifetime, as early as 1853 she had settled into the rhythms of highly compressed, short-lined metrical verse she would maintain – with rare exceptions – for the rest of her life, including in her passages of metered prose.

In September 1862, readers of the short-lived Continental Monthly might have encountered the following prediction by prominent editor and sometime politician Horace Greeley: The United States of the future will be no constrained alliance of discordant and mutually repellant [sic] commonwealths, but a true exemplification of “many in one” – many stars blended in one common flag – many States combined in one homogeneous Nation. Our Union will be one of bodies not merely, but of souls.1