Books by Wilson Jeremiah Moses

Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925 (1988)  / The Wings of Ethiopia  (1990)

 Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent (1992)  / Destiny & Race: Selected Writings, 1840-1898  (1992) 

 Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth (1993)

Liberian Dreams: Back-to-Africa Narratives from the 1850s  / Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (2002)

Creative Conflict in African American Thought (2004)

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Bio-Sketch

Wilson Jeremiah Moses  received his Ph.D., Brown University, 1975. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Ford Foundation; grants from ACLS, NEH, American Philosophical Society. And he has enjoyed Senior Fulbright Professorships at University of Vienna and University of Berlin.

Wilson Jeremiah Moses is Ferree Professor of American History and Senior Fellow of the Arts and Humanities Institute at the Pennsylvania State University. He has been Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the Free University of Berlin and Fulbright Guest Professor at the University of Vienna. He has written five books an published three others as a documentary editor.

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"My undergraduate and early graduate studies were centered in European intellectual history, religious studies, and art history, with a concentration on British literature, 1660-1822. I was early influenced by James G. Frazier's The Golden Bough, Grimm's Fairy Tales, and all historical and linguistic approaches to language and literature. My fascination with classical and Germanic mythology led me as an adult to spend as much time as possible in Europe. In later years, while teaching at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Vienna, I was able to conduct office hours in German. I have painfully achieved a more limited but passable, ability to read and write French, by taking language courses at the Catholic University of Paris.

“My publishing specialty has emphasized the intellectual culture of Afro-American elites in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My studies in political and economic thought are consistently integrated with my artistic and literary interests. For the past decade my teaching has focused on the United States, 1787 to 1848. I am currently writing articles on Benjamin Franklin and W. E. B. Du Bois, for the Cambridge University press, and completing a book on European influences on American literary and intellectual history during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.” more bio 

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Table

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I have been reading Lessing's 1759 essay on fables and his translations into German of Aesop (a Negro?) yesterday morning.  I don't know what influences Lessing might have had on the Grimm Brothers.  I think Lessing must have influenced people like Leo Frobenius, an important German student of African myths and legends around 1900.  Senghor and Cesaire say the French negritude poets were fascinated by Frobenius' work, when it was finally translated into French. Du Bois read Frobenius in German, and Frobenius was a major influence on his book The Negro (1915), Black Folk, Then and Now (1939, and The World and Africa (1946),  Du Bois writes of the influences of Richard Wagner on himself in his Autobiography.   Uncle Jeff and His Contempos

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Oops!  I forgot.  The Civil War had nothing to do with the Jeffersonian slavery based economy; it arose from the irrepressible patriotic impulse of the American heroes, Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, who resisted the intrusions of big government in Washington, and "beltway politicians," a bunch of liberals wanted to take away our guns and our freedoms.  

The Mexican War was fought in order to avenge the massacre at the Alamo, and because it was our manifest (self evident) destiny (came from God) to pave a pathway to the Pacific. Only a year later, after California had been justly and appropriately annexed, did gold become a factor in California history, that is in 1849. 

The Spanish/American war [What? That's not the same as the Mexican War?].   No, kids, it's not the same!   The Spanish American War happened like this:  Suppose you were a kid on the playground, and you saw a big bully (Spain) messin' with a little kid (Cuba), well you ought to step in and help.  Right? Teflon Sense of History

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I don't know what good it did a little colored boy on the east side of Detroit to have this information, but by the time, I was fourteen, I had pretty-well worked my way through the two Tchaikovsky compositions that my father had in his collections of 78 RPM recordings, and when good old mom brought home a translation of Dante's Divine Comedy complete with all the Doré engravings, well, wasn't I in seventh heaven.  I read the entire Inferno, although I didn't have the foggiest notion of what I was reading.  But perhaps that the story of Dante's devotion and the concept of Platonic love saved me during my sexually deprived adolescence, from many of the problems that befall black boys.   I attended a Roman Catholic Parochial school, where my two sisters and I constituted half the colored population.  Sexual Puritanism was a good defense mechanism in that working-class German and Italian environment. A Response to Professor Cleanth Brooks

updated 11 October 2007