Black Print Unbound The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture

Black Print Unbound explores the development of the Christian Recorder during and just after the American Civil War. As a study of the African Methodist Episcopal Church newspaper and so of a periodical with national reach among free African Americans, Black Print Unbound is at once a massive recovery effort of a publication by African Americans for African Americans, a consideration of the nexus of African Americanist inquiry and print culture studies, and an intervention in the study of literatures of the Civil War, faith communities, and periodicals.

Eric Gardner is Professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University. He is the author of Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature.

Chapter 1
White Houses and Black Print

Part I:
"Our Church Organ": Toward a Cultural and Material History of the Early Recorder

Chapter 2
"Dense Darkness": Recovering the Recorder's History

Chapter 3
From Pine Street to the Nation (and Back Again): The Business of the Recorder

Chapter 4
"Their Friends at Home with Papers": Recorder Subscription and Subscribers

Part II:
"Would not such a narration be worth reading?": The Christian Recorder and African American Literary History

Chapter 5
"We are in the world": Reading the Recorder in the Civil War Era

Chapter 6
"So Let Us Hear from All the Brethren": The Christian Recorder and Correspondence

Chapter 7
"That Wished Home of Peace": The Personal and the Political in Christian Recorder Elegies

Chapter 8
Black (Women's) Fortunes and The Curse of Caste

Works Cited

Index