Review Essay: CROSSING BOUNDARIES AND CREATING COMMUNITY African American Identity and Politics in Antebellum New York and Washington D.C

W. E. B. DuBois first began addressing these questions at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the 1960s and 70s, a new generation of scholars began publishing work on the black urban experience . Examples include: Gilbert Osofsky , Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, The Negro in New York, 1890-1920 (New York, 1966 ); Allan H. Spear , Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago, 1967); and Kenneth L. Kusmer , Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland 1870-1930 (Urbana, 1976). More recent examples include: Joe Trotter , Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-1945 (Urbana , 1985); James Grossman , Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners and the Great Migration (New York, 1991); Tera Hunter , To `Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, 1997); Kimberly Phillips , Alabama North: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915-1945 ( Urbana, 1999).

Examples include: Gary B. Nash , Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840 (Cambridge, 1988); Leon F. Litwack , The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, 1961); Patrick Rael , Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill , 2002); James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton , In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York, 1997); August Meier and Elliott M. Rudwick , "Negroes in Ante-bellum Cities: Manumission, Alienation, and Protest" in From Plantation to Ghetto: An Interpretive History of American Negroes ( New York, 1966); George A. Levesque , Black Boston: African American Life and Culture in Urban America, 1750-1860 (New York, 1994); James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton , Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (New York, 1979); Leonard P. Curry , The Free Black in Urban America, 1800-1850 (Chicago, 1981); Harry Reed , Platform for Change: The Foundations of the Northern Free Black Community, 1775-1865 (East Lansing , 1994); Rhoda Golden Freeman , The Free Negro in New York City in the Era Before the Civil War (New York , 1994).

For example, see Kevin Gaines , Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill , 1996).

The most recent examples include Richard S. Newman , The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic ( Chapel Hill, 2002) and Paul Goodman , Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley , 1998).

For example, see Graham Russell Hodges , Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863 (Chapel Hill, 1999).