“a black diamond among thim American wifes”
![Manuscript text, selected from a black diamond among thim American wifes](/sites/idrh/files/styles/21_9_placeholder_/public/2021-01/Meilke_plain2.png?h=44ff73cc&itok=AwL9Uvtp)
“a black diamond among thim American wifes”
Kate Edwards Swayze’s Antislavery Adaptation of George Colman’s Inkle and Yarico
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The Kansas State Historical Society holds notebooks containing a handful of original unpublished dramas by New York playwright Kate Edwards Swayze (1834-62), author of Ossawattomie Brown.; or The Insurrection at Harper’s Ferry (1859).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. Mielke and Baldwin transcribed and encoded the play manuscript in TEI-compliant XML and then used the tool Juxta to create a collation of it and Colman’s original. The edition includes the full play by Swayze (the title of which contains a racist epithet), eight passages highlighted for direct comparison with Inkle and Yarico, and a scholarly introduction and notes.