IV. Periodicals and Newspapers
Published by Routledge (Oxfordshire, UK), this journal focuses on a discussion of the demographic, socio-economic, historical & psychological aspects of human bondage from the ancient period to the present. Its special edition (vol. 33, issue 2, 2012) is devoted to the theme, “African Americans and Transatlantic Abolition 1845-1865).
Former slave and Abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass first published the North Star in July, 1841. After escaping from bondage in 1838, Douglass became a lecturer on slavery and set upon a plan to establish a newspaper he was convinced would help free all the slaves. He wrote on its establishment, "It has long been our anxious wish to see, in this slave-holding, slave-trading, and negro-hating land, a printing-press and paper, permanently established, under the complete control and direction of the immediate victims of slavery and oppression." Douglas named the paper the North Star because escaping slaves, who generally moved at night, followed its light.
Another abolitionist paper published by Frederick Douglass from 1847 to 1860.
William Lloyd Garrison, one of the most famous abolitionists in American History, established a weekly newspaper, at Boston, in 1831. Until after the Civil War, Garrison would live up to the pledge he made in the paper's first issue to be outspoken in his efforts to end slavery and further the rights of America's blacks. The paper's subscription list grew slowly, but gradually he gained readers across the country. Some have attributed abolitionist papers like the Liberator with gradually putting slavery at the top of the nation's agenda. The last issue of the Liberator was published in 1865.