NORTHERN VISIONS OF RACE,
REGION, & REFORM is an online resource documenting
conflicting representations of African-Americans,
white Southerners, and reformers
during and and immediately after the Civil War.
In particular, it looks at the stereotypes popularized in the northern
press, and the ways that these depictions were countered--or in some
cases, reinforced--in the letters written for northern readers by
freedmen's teachers and freedmen themselves.
Many of the northern volunteers who
set
up schools for former slaves during the Civil War
had
little or no previous acquaintance with
African-Americans
or white Southerners. Strangers in a
strange-seeming land,
the teachers wrote letters describing their
encounters
with these unfamiliar peoples. Sometimes these
accounts
reinforced common stereotypes; other times they
undermined
prevailing myths.
Students of the freedmen's schools
also used their writing to offer sketches of Southerners and
African-Americans, sometimes describing the harsh treatment slaves had
received at the hands of owners, and at other times providing
illustrations of their own zeal for learning and ambitions for the
future.
During
the same period, depictions of African-Americans
and Southerners
frequently appeared in northern publications such
as the
New-York Illustrated News, Harper's
Weekly,
and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.
However,
no single way of representing these groups
prevailed.
Instead, conflicting stereotypes were often
employed on
the same page.
Celebrated in both the northern
press and
the letters of the freedmen, freedmen's teachers
were
portrayed as reformers providing instruction in
all "the
arts of civilized life." But with the end of
the
war came a debate in the north about whether
teachers
should change their focus to include southern
whites,
and about whether the freedmen should be left
alone to
help themselves.
This site uses the letters written
by freedmen
and their teachers, articles and illustrations
from northern
periodicals, and other primary resources drawn
from the
collections of the American Antiquarian Society to
invite
users to explore the shifting and contradictory
images
of race, region, and reform disseminated in the
North
between 1861 and 1871.
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