James W.C. Pennington

This volume offers pioneering new essays on the life, writings, and contexts of nineteenth-century Black thinker and activist James W.C. Pennington. Mostly forgotten after Reconstruction, Pennington was an internationally-acclaimed Black intellectual during his own day. His activism took him to Europe, Jamaica, and across the United States. His theological training in the Edwardsean tradition, along with his extensive research into Black history, made him a leading African American intellectual and one of the most incisive critics of slavery and racism. Bringing together experts from a variety of disciplines, this volume re-inserts Pennington into contemporary scholarship on abolitionism, antebellum religion, Romanticism, and transnational reform movements.