Talk:Charles Ball

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Richardnel37. Peer reviewers: Richardnel37.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 17:12, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

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I've heard a very reputable scholar giving a talk on this subject and he was pretty clear that the book was written by an abolitionist and 'Charles Ball' didn't really exist, perhaps someone with expertise on this topic could update the article. Portcullis (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 19:40, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

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Much new information has meticulously been recovered by Michaël Roy in "The Vanishing Slave: Publishing the Narrative of Charles Ball, from Slavery in the United States (1836) to Fifty years in Chains (1858)" Publication of the Bibliographic Society of America 111:4 (2017): 513-545. Jonathan.h.grossman (talk) 18:07, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Wonderful. Thanks a lot. --Rsk6400 (talk) 19:12, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

Specifying which 1837 edition
I’ve added a few words to specify which 1837 edition is meant. The illustration shows the 1837 Pittsburgh edition, but the page references in the article refer to the 1837 New York edition. It would appear that the Pittsburgh edition is earlier: it carries an 1836 copyright notice (“Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1836…”), whereas the New York edition carries an 1837 copyright notice. It also appears that the Pittsburgh edition might be the source of the abridged 1859 edition referred to in the article, since it is shorter, and its introduction (different from the New York edition’s) mentions that “Many of his opinions have been cautiously omitted, or carefully suppressed, as being of no value to the reader.…”

UPDATE: I was mistaken in a stupid way: I failed to notice that the title page of the Pittsburgh edition bears a date of 1853, though its copyright notice is dated 1836. There is, however, a Lewiston edition published in 1836 (available at Google Books), which is doubtless the first, and has the same introduction as the later Pittsburgh edition. At any rate, the text I added makes the edition more specific and easier to find, so I’ve left it. Cbaile19 (talk) 18:33, 28 June 2021 (UTC)
 * The article by Michael Roy (first reference) details the publication history. For some months now, I've been intending to use Roy to correct some details given in our article, but never found the time to do it. --Rsk6400 (talk) 19:01, 28 June 2021 (UTC)