In her chronological study of Black and white antislavery activism in the early United States, Americanist and historian Marie-Jeanne Rossignol succeeds in several things, three of which are of particular importance. For one, as much as this study is a vindication of early American Studies, it does so from the vantage point of Black political organization today: invoking the current moment of #BlackLivesMatter early in her introduction asks us, not least, to consider the origins of Black activism (10). If for Christopher J. Lebron (The Making of Black Lives Matter, 2017) these origins can be traced back at least to Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells, Rossignol demonstrates convincingly that we must return to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the actual first period of the civil rights movement (10). This assessment frames her study (10; 189), and she shows that the arguments of such early Black leaders as Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, or David Walker prepare the intellectual ammunition for later civil rights icons in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (189). In establishing this trajectory, Rossignol demonstrates not simply that early US history is important, which will easily find supporters in the scholarly community, but more so that the history/ies of Black people in the US and North America are central to understanding this history, and that, lastly, Black history is US history.
Second, despite its conciseness and brevity—sitting at roughly 180 pages of main text—Rossignol’s study provides a rich diachronic overview of the evolution of antislavery agitation in the foundational period of the United States…