Advocates of Freedom

Hannah-Rose Murray is Early Career Leverhulme Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, researching formerly enslaved oratorical, visual and literary testimony in the British Isles during the nineteenth century.

• Introduction: 'To Tell The Truth': African American activism in the British Isles 1835–1895; 1. 'It Is Time For The Slaves to Speak': Moses Roper, white networks and 'Lying Inventions' 1835–1855; 2. 'All the Bloody Paraphernalia of Slavery': Frederick Douglass' performative strategies on the Victorian stage; 3. '[They Have] Not Ceased to Hold My Hand Since': Frederick Douglass, print culture and abolitionist networks; 4. To 'Frighten The Hyena Out Of His Ferocity': black activism in Britain 1850–1860; 5. 'I Would Much Rather Starve In England, A Free Woman, Than Be A Slave': black women and adaptive resistance 1850–1865; 6. 'Have No Fellowship I Pray You, With These Merciless Menstealers': black activism, the Confederacy and scientific racism during the Civil War 1861–1865; 7. 'My Name is Not Tom': Josiah Henson, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and adaptive resistance after the Civil War 1876–1877; 8. 'The Black People's Side Of The Story': Ida B. Wells and the anti-lynching crusade in Britain 1893–1894; 9. 'To Tell the Story of the Slave': the legacy of African American transatlantic resistance.

'Hannah-Rose Murray's accomplished study is a tour-de-force of scholarly research that challenges our understanding of transatlantic African American abolitionists by presenting original insights about their impact on British audiences and evolving print and performance cultures.' Barbara McCaskill, Professor of English and author of Love, Liberation and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory