Colleen Wyrick

Liverpool University Press | $150.00 | Published 2020 | 224 pages | ISBN 9781789622591

From the publisher: “The Ties that Bind explores in depth the close affinities that bound together anti-slavery activists in Britain and the USA during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, years that witnessed the overthrow of slavery in both the British Caribbean and the American South. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, the book sheds important new light on the dynamics of abolitionist opinion building during the Age of Reform, from books and artefacts to anti-slavery songs, lectures and placards. Building an anti-slavery public required patience and perseverance. It also involved an engagement with politics, even if anti-slavery activists disagreed about what form that engagement should take. This is a book about the importance of transatlantic co-operation and the transmission of ideas and practices. Yet, at the same time, it is also alert to the tensions that underlay these ‘Atlantic affinities’, particularly when it came to what was sometimes perceived as the increasing Americanization of anti-slavery protest culture. Above all, The Ties that Bind stresses the importance of personality, perhaps best exemplified in the enduring transatlantic friendship between George Thompson and William Lloyd Garrison.”

Also available at our TCU library as an ebook.

The University of Alabama Press | $54.95 | Published 2021 | 193 pages | ISBN 9780817393373

From the publisher: “Kendall McClellan uncovers a fundamental and still redolent transformation in conceptions of civic identity that occurred over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Literature of this period exposes an emotional investment in questions of civic selfhood born out of concern for national stability and power, which were considered products of both economic strength and a nation’s moral fiber. McClellan shows how these debates traversed the Atlantic to become a prominent component of early American literature, evident in works by James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Sarah Josepha Hale, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others. Underlying popular opinion about who could participate in the political public, McClellan argues, was an impassioned rhetorical wrestling match over the right and wrong ways to demonstrate civic virtue. Relying on long-established tropes of republican virtue that lauded self-sacrifice and disregard for personal safety, abolitionist writers represented loyalty to an ideals-based community as the surest safeguard of both private and public virtue. This evolution in civic virtue sanctioned acts of protest against the state, offered disenfranchised citizens a role in politics, and helped usher in the modern transnational public sphere. Virtuous Citizens shows that the modern public sphere has always constituted a vital and powerful space for those invested in addressing injustice and expanding democracy. To illuminate some of the fundamental issues underlying today’s sociopolitical unrest, McClellan traces the transatlantic origins of questions still central to the representation of movements like Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, and the Alt-Right: What is the primary loyalty of a virtuous citizen? Are patriots those who defend the current government against attacks, external and internal, or those who challenge the government to fulfill sociopolitical ideals?”

Also available at our TCU library as an ebook.

New York: Routledge | $128.00 | Published 2023 | 236 pages | ISBN 9781032260044

From the publisher: “This book examines the imperial spectacles and startling reversals of fortune related in William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) and History of the Conquest of Peru (1847), and investigates how these accounts inspired fictional adaptations by George A. Henty, H. Rider Haggard, and George Griffith. The revision of history in the Amerindian adventure both entertained young transatlantic audiences and was a vehicle to attract tourism and investment in countries such as Mexico and Peru. Henty, Haggard, and Griffith, moreover, used their tales of adventure as a platform to impart British values to their readers. Such values compel the characters and narrators of the novels discussed to act as cultural mediators, to acquire indigenous languages and adopt native ways of being, and, in several of the romance adventures under consideration, to marry Mexican or Incan noblewomen. Part I, Conquest, examines George Henty’s By Right of Conquest: Or, With Cortez in Mexico (1891), H. Rider Haggard’s Montezuma’s Daughter (1893), and George Griffith’s Virgin of the Sun: A Tale of the Conquest of Peru (1898). Part II, Reclamation, argues that English re-writings of history work to eclipse the Spanish in Haggard’s Virgin the Sun (1922), Henty’s Treasure of the Incas (1902) and Griffith’s Romance of Golden Star (1897).”

University of Edinburgh Press | $20.95 | Published 2020 | 312 pages | ISBN 9781474426275

From the publisher: “This pioneering collection brings alive the world of public speaking between the American Revolution and the age of the Suffragettes. It presents over seventy speeches by a diverse range of female and male activists, politicians, tribal leaders, fugitive slaves and preachers from both sides of the Atlantic, debating the crucial issues of the day, from socialism and imperialism to slavery and women’s suffrage. Complete with detailed notes, introductions, illustrations and suggestions for further reading, it provides a unique introduction to transatlantic history and culture.”

Also available at our TCU library as an ebook.

University of Edinburgh Press | Published 2020 | 371 pages | ISBN 9781108487511

From the publisher: “During the nineteenth century, scores of formerly enslaved individuals like Frederick Douglass traveled to England, Ireland, Scotland and even parts of rural Wales to educate the British public on slavery. By sharing their oratorical, visual and literary testimony to transatlantic audiences, African American women and men were soldiers in the fight for liberty, and as a result their journeys were inevitably and inescapably radical. Their politicized messages and appeals for freedom had severe consequences for former slaveholders, pro-slavery defenders, white racists and ignorant publics: the act of traversing the Atlantic itself highlighted not only their death-defying escapes from bondage but also their desire to speak out against slavery and white supremacy on foreign soil. They traveled thousands of miles, wrote hundreds of letters or narratives and lectured to millions of people, for hours on end. In doing so, they often pushed their bodies (and voices) to breaking point. In this book, I theorize that throughout their journeys to Britain, African Americans engaged in a uniquely British strategy I have termed adaptive resistance, which attempts to measure their success on the Victorian stage by examining their exploitation or relationship with abolitionist networks, print culture and performance.”

University of California Press | $49.95 | Published 2020 | 318 pages | ISBN 9780520344709

From the publisher: “The United States was made in Britain. For over a hundred years following independence, a diverse and lively crowd of emigrant Americans left the United States for Britain. From Liverpool and London, they produced Atlantic capitalism and managed transfers of goods, culture, and capital that were integral to U.S. nation-building. In British social clubs, emigrants forged relationships with elite Britons that were essential not only to tranquil transatlantic connections, but also to fighting southern slavery. As the United States descended into Civil War, emigrant Americans decisively shaped the Atlantic-wide battle for public opinion. Equally revered as informal ambassadors and feared as anti-republican contagions, these emigrants raised troubling questions about the relationship between nationhood, nationality, and foreign connection. Blending the histories of foreign relations, capitalism, nation-formation, and transnational connection, Stephen Tuffnell compellingly demonstrates that the United States’ struggle toward independent nationhood was entangled at every step with the world’s most powerful empire. With deep research and vivid detail, Made in Britain uncovers this hidden story and presents a bold new perspective on the nineteenth-century cross-Atlantic relations.”

Also available at our TCU library as an ebook.

University of New Mexico Press | $34.95 | Published 2020 | 352 pages | ISBN 9780826361189

From the publisher: “A Troubled Marriage describes the lives of native leaders whose resilience and creativity allowed them to survive and prosper in the traumatic era of European conquest and colonial rule. They served as soldiers, scholars, artists, artisans, and missionaries within early transatlantic empires and later nation-states. These Indian and mestizo men and women wove together cultures, shaping the new traditions and institutions of the colonial Americas. In a comparative study that spans more than three centuries and much of the Western Hemisphere, McEnroe challenges common assumptions about the relationships among victors, vanquished, and their shared progeny.”

Also available at our TCU library as an ebook.