The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation - by Benjamin Fagan (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation shows how antebellum African Americans used the newspaper as a means for translating their belief in black "chosenness" into plans and programs for black liberation. During the decades leading up the Civil War, the idea that God had marked black Americans as his chosen people on earth became a central article of faith in northern black communities, with black newspaper editors articulating it in their journals.

Benjamin Fagan shows how the early black press helped shape the relationship between black chosenness and the struggles for black freedom and equality in America, in the process transforming the very notion of a chosen American nation. Exploring how cultures of print helped antebellum black Americans apply their faith to struggles grand and small, The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation uses the vast and neglected archive of the early black press to shed new light on many of the central figures and questions of African American studies.

Review Quotes

The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation is a well-written, original, and thoughtful book that makes a significant contribution to the study of the early U.S. newspaper, the early black press, and early African American print culture, writ large.-- "Early American Literature"

A unique and refreshing perspective on the historic significance of the antebellum black press.--Alonzo M. Ward "The Journal of African American History"

Fagan reads newspapers as a central vehicle for nineteenth-century black Americans' religious and political self-expression. . . . [I]n focusing on the ideological and religious values that propel the early black press, Fegan usefully builds on the work of scholars such as Frances Smith Foster, Carla Peterson, John Ernest, and Eric Gardner, who have emphasized the Afro-Protestant press's central role in nineteenth-century black print culture. . . . Fagan's book nimbly balances analysis of political and religious newspaper content alongside attention to each paper's historical context.-- "American Periodicals"

Fagan's work invites us and teaches us how to read like a nineteenth-century newspaper reader, attuned to the unexpected and the unintended, and alive to the possibility of different American futures. It is this invitation that ultimately makes his book such a rewarding and invigorating read.-- "Common-place: The Journal of Early American Life"

About the Author

BENJAMIN FAGAN is an associate professor of English at Auburn University. He is the author of The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (Georgia). He is also the editor of the forthcoming African American Literature in Transition, 1830-1850.