Biographical Research at the Massachusetts Historical Society has Discovered in The 1773 Diary of Jeremy Belknap (1744-98), a Congregationalist clergyman, what is likely a text by Phillis Wheatley that predates any known before now. Belknap's diary is interleaved in Bickerstaff's Boston Almanack. For the Year of Our Lord, 1773. The last page includes a twenty-word poem in Belknap's hand that he identifies as “Phillis Wheatley's first Effort———-AD 1765. EE 11.” Belknap transcribes the text twice. The first version is in three lines, as if he could not decide whether it was prose or poetry, with an inserted two-word phrase placed above the first line and located by a caret below it:

Introduction: The Francophone Uncle Tom's Cabin

The Overlooked American Francophone Novel Le Vieux Salomon, Ou Une Famille D'Esclaves Au XIXE Siècle (OLD SOLOMON; OR, A Slave Family in the Nineteenth Century), by Charles Testut (1819-92), offers a contemporaneous description of slavery as a global commerce with international causes and effects. The novel's geographic scope, as well as Testut's interest in contrasting the life in the French Caribbean with slavery in the United States, makes Old Solomon an ideal text through which to examine the representation of economic and cultural circulation in the Americas. Old Solomon is a clear response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), with some similar characters and situations, but is more trangressive and violent.

As many articles in the March 2009 issue of PMLA imply, the question of ability is central to any consideration of the human. For example, in “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities” (124.2 [2009]: 564–75), Cary Wolfe shows how the humanities transgresses its own limits and thereby shifts its locus and center. Insofar as this broad area of study is the appropriate venue for reflection on the discursive boundary of the human, it must erase that boundary.

As many articles in the March 2009 issue of PMLA imply, the question of ability is central to any consideration of the human. For example, in “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities” (124.2 [2009]: 564–75), Cary Wolfe shows how the humanities transgresses its own limits and thereby shifts its locus and center. Insofar as this broad area of study is the appropriate venue for reflection on the discursive boundary of the human, it must erase that boundary.

As many articles in the March 2009 issue of PMLA imply, the question of ability is central to any consideration of the human. For example, in “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities” (124.2 [2009]: 564–75), Cary Wolfe shows how the humanities transgresses its own limits and thereby shifts its locus and center. Insofar as this broad area of study is the appropriate venue for reflection on the discursive boundary of the human, it must erase that boundary.