2 Books Published by University of Michigan Library on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Click for more detail about The REV. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman: A Narrative of Real Life by Jermain Wesley Loguen The REV. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman: A Narrative of Real Life

by Jermain Wesley Loguen
University of Michigan Library (Jan 01, 2001)
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This work is an experimental autobiography: Loguen’s life story is narrated as a third-person account of his early life in slavery, his escape north, and his ministerial and abolitionist activities in New York and Canada.

Loguen is a significant figure in nineteenth-century abolitionism and African American literature. A highly respected leader in the AME Zion Church, Rev. Loguen was popularly known as “Underground Railroad King” in Syracuse, New York, where he was eventually credited with helping over 1,500 fugitives escape from slavery.|

The Rev. J. W. Loguen constitutes an important contribution to the African American slave narrative tradition. It has been favorably compared to Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and it anticipates many of the themes explored in Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)


Click for more detail about The Minister’s Wooing. by Whitney J. Leblanc The Minister’s Wooing.

by Whitney J. Leblanc
University of Michigan Library (Dec 31, 1799)
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The Minister’s Wooing is a historical novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, first published in 1859. Set in 18th-century New England, the novel explores New England history, highlights the issue of slavery, and critiques the Calvinist theology in which Stowe was raised. Due to similarities in setting, comparisons are often drawn between this work and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. However, in contrast to Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter, The Minister’s Wooing is a "sentimental romance"; its central plot revolves around courtship and marriage. Moreover, Stowe’s exploration of the regional history of New England deals primarily with the domestic sphere, the New England response to slavery, and the psychological impact of the Calvinist doctrines of predestination and disinterested benevolence.