[Reader-list] Digital library of African American Women Writers of the 19thCentury

[Adhimoolam Murugan]

Hi,

I thought that the following info might be of interest to you.

Vetri.

Click on the following link to explore more.

http://digital.nypl.org/schomburg/writers_aa19/intro.html

Introduction
African American Women Writers of the 19thCentury
Howard Dodson, Chief
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
The New York Public Library

The nineteenth century was a formative period in African-American literary and cultural history. Prior to the Civil War, the majority of black Americans
living in the United States were held in bondage. Law and practice forbade teaching blacks from learning to read or write. Even after the war, many of
the impediments to learning and literary productivity remained. Nevertheless, black men and women of the nineteenth century learned to both read and write.
Moreover, more African-Americans than we yet realize turned their observations, feelings, social viewpoints, and creative impulses into published works.
In time, this nineteenth-century printed record included poetry, short stories, histories, narratives, novels, autobiographies, social criticism, and theology,
as well as economic and philosophical treatises. Unfortunately, much of this body of literature remained, until very recently, relatively inaccessible
to twentieth-century scholars, teachers, creative artists, and others interested in black life. Prior to the late 1960s, most Americans (black as well
as white) had never heard of these nineteenth-century authors, much less read their works.

The civil rights and black power movements created unprecedented interest in the thought, behavior, and achievements of black people. Publishers responded
by revising traditional texts, introducing the American public to a generation of new African-American writers, publishing a variety of thematic anthologies,
and reprinting a plethora of "classic texts" in African-American history, literature, and art. The reprints usually appeared as individual titles or in
a series of bound volumes or microform formats.

The Schomburg Center, which has had a long history of supporting publishing projects on the history and culture of Africans in the diaspora, became an active
participant in many of the reprint revivals of the 1960s. Since hard copies of original printed works were the preferred formats for producing facsimile
reproductions, publishers frequently turned to the Schomburg Center for copies of these original titles. In addition to providing such materials, Schomburg
Center staff members offered advice and consultation, wrote introductions, and occasionally entered into formal co-publishing arrangements in some projects.

Most of the nineteenth-century titles reprinted during the 1960s and 1970s, however, were by and about black men. A few black women were included in the
longer series, but works by lesser-known black women were generally overlooked. The last two decades have witnessed an explosion of interest on writing
by and about black women. In response to this interest, the Schomburg Center, in collaboration with Dr. Henry Louis Gates and Oxford University Press,
published the thirty-volume Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers in 1988. This collection is now out of print, but there is a continuing
need to make works by 19th-century black women writers available to scholars, students and the general public alike. They constitute the foundations of
the African American and African American women's literary traditions, containing as they do, the first book of poetry by an African American (Poems on
Various Subjects, Religions and Moral by Phillis Wheatly (1773); the first book of essays by an African American, Essays by Ann Plato (1841); and the first
novel published by a black person in the United States, Our Nig by Harriet Wilson (1859).

African American Women Writers of the 19th Century is a digital collection of some 52 published works by 19th-century black women writers. A part of the
Digital Schomburg, this collection provides access to the thought, perspectives and creative abilities of black women as captured in books and pamphlets
published prior to 1920. A full text database of these 19th and early 20th- century titles, this digital library is key-word-searchable. Each individual
title as well as the entire database can be searched to determine what these women had to say about "family", "religion", "slavery" or any other subject
of interest to the researcher or casual reader. The Schomburg Center is pleased to make this historic resource available to the public.

[6/9/98]

©1999 The New York Public Library
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