Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia

Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia - Cover

Emancipation and the Long Struggle for Racial Justice in the City of Brotherly Love

edited by Richard Newman

edited by James Mueller

Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World

288 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations

Social Studies / Slavery Studies

Hardcover / 9780807139912 / November 2011
$39.95

Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia considers the cultural, political, and religious contexts shaping the long struggle against racial injustice in one of early America’s most important cities. Comprised of nine scholarly essays by a distinguished group of historians, the volume recounts the antislavery movement in Philadelphia from its marginalized status during the colonial era to its rise during the Civil War. 

Philadelphia was the home to the Society of Friends, which offered the first public attack on slavery in the 1680s; the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the western world’s first antislavery group; and to generations of abolitionists who organized some of early America’s most important civil rights groups. 
 
These abolitionists—black, white, religious, secular, male, female—grappled with the meaning of black freedom earlier and more consistently than anyone else in early American culture. Cutting-edge academic views illustrate Philadelphia’s antislavery movement, how it survived societal opposition, and how it remained vital to evolving notions of racial justice.

Richard S. Newman is Professor of History at the Rochester Institute of Technology and author of Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, The AME Church and the Black Founding Fathers and The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery In the Early Republic. 

James Mueller recently retired as the Chief Historian at the Independence Hall National Historic Park in Philadelphia.

Praise for Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia

“This collection offers a scholarly panoply that mirrors the diversity of the antislavery community depicted in the book....Today's readers, the editors' hope, can use their volume similarly to rediscover 'the meaning of Philadelphia's abolitionist past' (14). They will not be disappointed.”—Corey M. Brooks, Civil War History

“Richard Newman and James Mueller have assembled a collection of original essays from leading scholars that delivers a series of sharp images of what integration actually did look like when black and white Philadelphians engaged one another in action and discourse over more than a century.”—Scott Hancock, H-Law

“The collection is very tightly focused, the essays are well written, and the information is useful to anyone interested in abolition.”—Beverly Tomek, Pennsylvania History

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