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Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing. By Christopher Hager. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. [xii], 311. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-674-05986-3.)
Christopher Hager's Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing seeks to bring the tools of intellectual history and literary analysis to the study of enslaved people's writing during the age of emancipation. The book is premised on the idea that, despite widespread illiteracy in the black community, writing was a central experience for hundreds of thousands of African Americans who either acquired literacy while still in bondage or learned to write soon after gaining their freedom. Hager consciously avoids fugitive slave narratives, focusing instead on manuscript sources like letters, poems, diaries, notes, and petitions penned by a cast of largely unfamiliar characters. "Scholars have mined slaves' letters for what they reveal about the conditions of southern slavery," states Hager, "but the letters' composition remains largely unconsidered as an experience unto...