Blog Posts
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In the summer of 1865, the good news of freedom finally came to the over two hundred fifty thousand enslaved persons of Texas. It came in the form of a general order from Major-General Gordon Granger of the Union Army. Its first sentence was the most important. “The people of Texas are informed that, in…
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In 1737, Jonathan Edwards published A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, one of the earliest written evangelical accounts describing the Great Awakening. In it, he mentions the presence of “several Negroes” taking part in the revivals. Yet, in his account, they are voiceless, passive recipients. Evangelical historiography has largely followed in Edwards’…
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“The negro can go into the circus, the theater, the cars…but cannot go into an Evangelical Christian meeting,” exclaimed an elderly Frederick Douglass in 1885 to a listening crowd in the nation’s capital. Celebrating the twenty-second anniversary of Washington, DC’s abolition of slavery, his celebratory oration was also the occasion of a critique of the…
Jessica N. Janvier, PhD 