The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4155549 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Toussaint Losier (0000-0002-2295-1531, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 103 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 756-757 |
| Publication date | 2016-12-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jaw380 |
| OpenAlex | W2972971593 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
On October 25, 1829, Eastern State Penitentiary, one of the first modern prisons in the United States, received its first prisoner, Charles Williams, a young African American man. Although little is known of Williams, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict details the experiences of another African American prisoner, Austin Reed. Through his previously unknown memoir, Reed describes how he was held in various New York penal institutions, first as an indentured servant and juvenile delinquent and then as an adult convict, during roughly the same period as Williams. Recently acquired and authenticated by a team of researchers associated with Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Reed's writing sheds light on the cruelties essential to New York's model of penal servitude just as it was becoming central to the early republic's penal ideology. Reed's unfinished manuscript is one of the first known prison memoirs written by an African American, and its publication is prefaced by David W. Blight and Robert B. Stepto's foreword as well as an introduction by the book's editor, Caleb Smith. The former celebrates Reed's narrative, placing it within the canon of nineteenth-century African American letters. The latter goes further, detailing how the research team pieced together the story behind the largely autobiographical text. Smith describes how researchers traced not only the details of the author's life story but also the literary and historical context in which it was produced. His analysis makes a strong case for Reed as “the object of some of nineteenth-century America's most elaborate experiments in the punishment of crime and management of human character” (p. xviii). To complement Reed's manuscript, this volume also includes an explanation of Smith's editing process, a chronology of Reed's life, his juvenile case file, and a list of Smith's textual emendations
Adventure · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Context (archaeology · Convict · Ideology · Literature · Memoir · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Prison · Servant · American and British Literature Analysis · Classics · History · Law · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Race, History, and American Society
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2018 - 2023 (6) |
| Highly cited | No |