By the time of his death, Lincoln had earned substantial recognition as a great president, even admiration as a statesman of outstanding quality. His assassination heightened the sense of loss and mourning Americans and others felt, in tributes, eulogies and sermons.

Drawing from critical realism and building on previous academic studies and writing theories and practices, the author advances approaches to academic writing that are both human and humane, by situating academic writing within the broader critical realist project of furthering human flourishing and emancipation; of what it means to be human; and of why things matter to people. Addressing what counts as human(e) in academic writing has become pressing, as concerns about machine-generated texts, such as Large Language Models like ChatGPT challenge understandings of truth, knowledge, and justice. Underlying the argument in this chapter is the assumption that writing in the academy is a social practice (specifically, a method of enquiry) that should be oriented towards epistemic virtues including commitment to truth and socially just standards of excellence. For academic writing to fulfil such commitments, the author argues that it needs to be human(e). For it to be human(e), it requires a writer–agent–knower to rationally judge between educative and harmful academic writing theories and practices, in the interests of human flourishing and emancipation.

Abraham Lincoln was conscious that the constitution gave him no authority to emancipate slaves under peacetime circumstances. Hence, his first movement toward emancipation was a plan for gradual, compensated emancipation of the slaves of the loyal border states. But even this plan was opposed by those states. So, in mid-1862, Lincoln turned to the powers he believed the constitution conferred on him as commander-in-chief to liberate the confederacy's slaves as a military measure for winning the war. He issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation in September, 1862, attempting to make it palatable beforehand by extracting promises of colonization abroad by the freed slaves. He then proceeded to issue a final proclamation on January 1, 1863. The colonization plan came to nothing. But Lincoln remained anxious about the constitutionality of his proclamation, and in January, 1865, obtained from congress a 13th amendment entirely abolishing slavery.

This chapter re-examines slavery and abolition in the writing and reception of the Declaration of Independence. Far from being marginal parts of the nation’s founding document, as previous generations of scholars asserted, both slavery and abolition proved to be essential to the making and meaning of the Declaration. Indeed, during and after the American Revolution, the Declaration testified to the nation’s high abolitionist ideals and the enduring problem of slavery in American statecraft. By examining not only Jefferson’s ideas about black freedom in the Revolutionary era but a wide range of reformers who meditated on it as well – including African American writers and reformers like Benjamin Banneker – this essay argues that the Declaration itself remains a testament to the conflicted nature of emancipation in the American mind.

Chapter 3 discusses Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s “philosophical draft” The Closed Commercial State (1800) and its blueprint for a world system of centrally directed, self-sufficient national economies that abandon commercial and political connections but remain interrelated through state-supervised intellectual exchanges. I argue that although not explicitly labeled as Weltliteratur, this design of cultural cooperation among otherwise insular national states is a paradigmatic configuration of world literature that offers an alternative economy of circulation in the form of planning. After outlining the mechanisms driving intercultural circulation in this model, the chapter examines how its underlying cosmopolitan universalism morphs into patriotic cosmopolitanism (and eventually collapses into a sense of German superiority) in Fichte’s later philosophy. I also argue that this design cast a long shadow in the twentieth century as it prefigured the most potent counter-system of “capitalist world literature”, the command economy of socialist internationalism in the Soviet Republic of Letters.

What were rights in seventeenth-century France, within the kingdom and its possessions? The French word ‘droits’ (rights) was rarely used. Jurists and claimants talked about liberties, privileges, exemptions, franchises. Liberties were understood in terms of entitlements, which were collective rather than personal. Subjects were granted different privileges depending on the order or estate to which they belonged. The clergy and the nobility enjoyed privileges denied to the common people (they did not, for example, pay taxes) because of the specific social roles they performed. People also enjoyed additional privileges and exemptions to the ones attached to their orders. They belonged to other groups, whether they were provinces, cities, communities, corporations, that granted specific privileges which the sovereign had to respect.

In this chapter we examine the connection between religion and abolition. After discussing early antislavery voices, such as the Essenes and St. Gregory of Nyssa, we recount in detail the growing Christian rejection of slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Attention is given to the arguments and action of early Quaker abolitionists, including John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, to Anglicans like Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, and to antislavery activism in North America leading up to the American Civil War. We then provide a theoretical evaluation of the role of Christianity in the nineteenth-century rejection of slavery. The chapter closes with an exposition of Islamic abolitionism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on Ahmad Bey, Rashid Rida, Mohsen Kadivar, and Bernard Freamon.

This chapter traces the experiences of Sarah Osborne Benjamin, who married a soldier in the Third New York Regiment and traveled with him from West Point to Philadelphia and Yorktown. Although she never learned to write, she left behind a rich oral autobiography: her application for a Revolutionary War pension. In it, she recalls her work as a washerwoman and cook, her relationships with other Continental Army women, and her postwar financial challenges. She offers a nuanced picture of the Continental Army as a place of oppressive surveillance but also complex social networking and protest. By exploring her interpretation of the American Revolution, I argue that, even as Continental Army women confronted bodily scrutiny and restrictive military regulations, they also derived power from their relationships. After the war, they used oral testimony, material culture, and strategic storytelling to exercise a distinctive form of archival agency.

A number of philosophical themes run throughout Marx’s corpus. Foremost is his focus on free social and political relations – on emancipated people governing themselves together rather than being mastered by others. There is no doubt, however, that Marx was a sharp critic of law, justice, and right (Recht) – which Kant had argued can only be realized in a state – and that Marx’s communist social ideal is nonjuridical. A second theme is that although Marx rejects the modern deontic conception of morality, he is very much aware that his own ideal of freedom is a modern conception, which is based, like modern morality, in a view of the unique value of human persons – the “self-worth of men” as “free.” A third is Marx’s communitarian emphasis on “a community of people [organized] for their highest ends”: a “democratic” society of free people, whether organized as a state or not. It is important that Marx does not ground his democratic conception as orthodox liberal moderns do in a deontic conception of fundamental equal human authority. Ultimately, Marx’s ideas must be understood as a liberal egalitarianism of the good rather than of the right.

Chapter 1 establishes the local context of the introduction of liberated Africans to Grenada and outlines the emergence of a plantation society built on unfree African labour. By emancipation in 1838, the formerly enslaved Africans had become a peasantry closely associated with Roman Catholicism and had developed Creole French, the Nation Dance, obeah, and saraka from their multiple African heritages and experiences in the Americas. They had survived and resisted enslavement through practising those cultures and by withdrawing fully or partially from plantation work, cultivating provision grounds, acquiring land, and forming villages; some of them migrated to Trinidad. These strategies and cultural practices were drawn upon by liberated Africans to refashion their own lives and cultures.

Marx’s early theory of labour and alienation originates from idealist concepts of spontaneity and formativity. His ideas of socialism and emancipation in the 1840s reprise aspects of Kantian autonomy and heteronomy and follow Fichte in linking labour with spontaneity. Marx formulates the dialectic of the will in a way favourable to the moment of particularity as membership in a social class, and sees one particular class as simultaneously a vehicle of universal interest and revolutionary transformation. Quantitative change is insufficient though necessary: a merely distributive socialism might enhance the living conditions of the workers, but would leave intact structures of exploitation which deprive workers of their agency as well as their happiness. His theory of history and emancipation, recently described as a self-actualisation account, can be more precisely identified as a variant of post-Kantian perfectionism, which, like Feuerbach’s, contains a strong admixture of pre-Kantian elements. This blending of heterogeneous elements has profound theoretical and practical consequences, notably in the absence of a developed concept of right.

Despite strong opposition within the army and society, the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps was created in 1942. Although segregated, it attracted many African-American women in search of income, emancipation or recognition of their contribution to the nation. The first two black companies were assigned to Huachuca to take over bureaucratic duties and traditionally female tasks. They were welcomed both as rivals and as possible sexual partners. Most of them turned this experience into an opportunity to assert their political, professional, and sexual agency. Their photographic and written documentation of their military experience at the fort offers a unique female gaze on the infantrymen’s training experience.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper work has helped reshape Civil War literary studies and illustrates the field’s larger preoccupations. This chapter centers on “Bury Me in a Free Land,” a poem that demonstrates the craft of a writer uniquely adept at using and subverting expectations in a literature that was highly conventional, thus illustrating for contemporary readers both the patterns and their breach. Harper’s poem speaks to the core preoccupations that scholars have been tracing as they identify an ever-broadening archive of Civil War literature, namely the importance of slavery and abolition, the role of death and suffering in the context of spirituality and sentimentality, the shifting understandings of race and gender, and the exploration of how the conflict would be remembered. Poetry was the period’s predominant genre, and this example points to current scholarly interest in works that are ephemeral, conventional, and written to appeal to a broad popular audience. Instead of asking what great works of literature writers in general and combatants in particular produced, as previous scholars had done, recent inquiries have considered a greater diversity of writers and taken an expansive approach to this large question: What is Civil War literature, and what cultural, social, and political contributions did it make?