Search Results

This chapter examines the emergence of the civic bureaucracy or civil service which implemented the decisions taken in the Courts of Aldermen and Common Council. The emergence of the three most important officers — the Recorder, Chamberlain and Common Clerk (responsible respectively for legal , financial and secretarial matters) — is first discussed. This is followed by the charting of the burgeoning of the civil service to include a host of more specialised officers with responsibilities ranging from sanitation to oversight of the river Thames.

This chapter examines the tension between slavery and freedom that distinguishes the form of Frances Harper's fiction. Harper's antislavery activism went hand in hand with her critique of marriage, so that—following abolition—her critique took a not unexpected turn toward racial uplift. By examining the significance of Harper's principle of marriage as “an affinity of souls” in relation to the abolitionist principles she espoused, this chapter examines her rediscovered stories first published in the Christian Recorder. These stories reveal a tension between the material benefits and spiritual costs of marriage, particularly to the public aspirations of her female heroes. Understanding the broad scope of her fiction allows readers to grasp the precariousness of Harper's political position as a free, black, and unmarried woman in the mid-nineteenth century.

This chapter offers a reading of Frances E. W. Harper's novel Trial and Triumph, serialized in the newspaper Christian Recorder in 1888–1889. Trial and Triumph, believed to be an autobiography, tells the story of a black girl who comes of age in an urban city in the North in the post-Civil War years. The protagonist rejects marriage and overcomes numerous losses in her early life, charting her own course and becoming a professional woman who travels south to educate the black masses. Harper's text was written with the goal of promoting change within the homes of black families. This chapter examines what material from her own life Harper included in her story and what kind of preparation for the future she presented for northern black girls in the 1880s. It also considers interiority and the issue of race as themes of Trial and Triumph and concludes by assessing Harper's vision of the potential opportunities for black girls who establish themselves in activist careers before they marry.

This chapter presents the story of the fragility of black literary communities appearing in unexpected places—in particular, the story of the ultimate disintegration of the Indiana base of the Repository. With the Recorder in Philadelphia and the Repository resettled in Baltimore, Weaver and Brown soon became somewhat-hesitant participants in a debate about whether the church could support two periodicals. This chapter examines the arguments swirling around the Recorder’s rebirth and the Repository’s demise; within this context, it closes with a contrastive reading of recently rediscovered Repository texts by early black activist Maria W. Stewart and Weaver’s later travel writing for the Recorder. It focuses not only on the varying conceptions of the West as a site of a version of the domesticated black frontier that John Berry Meachum alluded to in his Address but also on two symbiotic forms of black mobility, that of the ever-striving settlers and that of itinerant ministers.

Chapter 29 engages with the person-situation debate in social psychology to shed light on the existence of moral character from a particular measurement perspective—namely, naturalistic observation. The chapter reports on studies that examined the stability of moral daily behaviors using the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), a digital audio-recorder that samples ambient sounds from participants’ daily lives. Across three studies, participants wore an EAR for one or two weekends. Positive (e.g., empathy, affection, gratitude) and negative (e.g., bragging, blaming, arrogance) moral behaviors were coded from the audio files. In empirical analyses, the coded moral behaviors evidenced substantial temporal stability. Moreover, the stability of moral behavior was comparable to the stability of neutral linguistic behaviors (e.g., the use of articles and prepositions). Together, these findings indicate that moral character can be naturalistically observed in daily life and is substantially stable across time.