Race

Project on the History of Black Writing
Project on the History of Black Writing

Overview

The Project on the History of Black Writing is a research unit in the Department of English within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. HBW has been in the forefront of research and inclusion efforts in higher education since its founding in 1983 at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. HBW is committed to literary recovery work in Black studies; innovative scholarship, book history and digital humanities; professional development and curriculum transformation; and public literacy programming.

“a black diamond among thim American wifes”
Manuscript text, selected from a black diamond among thim American wifes

Overview

The Kansas State Historical Society holds notebooks containing a handful of original unpublished dramas by New York playwright Kate Edwards Swayze (1834-62), author of Ossawattomie Brown.; or The Insurrection at Harper’s Ferry (1859). One of these is an anti-slavery play that revises George Colman’s Inkle and Yarico (1787) to tell the story of a White Southerner who falls in love with the African woman he seeks to enslave.