Emily Dickinson wrote a letter to a stranger in 1870 in which she asked the recipient, the writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to read a few of her poems. The letter sparked an enduring correspondence between the two, who became friends before eventually meeting eight years later. The friendship was said to have changed Dickinson, giving her a new confidence, as Martha Ackmann chronicles in her book These Fevered Days.
In the abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s 1866 essay “Reconstruction,” he dissects how the enterprise of slavery could not be righted without devising a plan that accounted for the danger in giving states too much autonomy. Douglass was keen to the way the institution of slavery could linger if not reckoned with honestly and ended definitively. Many inconsistent or inaccurate perceptions of American history still persist, obscuring the realities of systemic injustice.
Many remarkable narratives explore the affliction of racially oppressed people in granular detail. Saidiya Hartman’s written history of black women arriving in urban American cityscapes at the turn of the 20th century encapsulates marginalized people’s struggle to live. In her book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, she centralizes the stories of that population of black drifters, marking all of the obstacles of their journeys, while underscoring the marvel of their existence.