04/08/2024
We recently acquired a copy of Awakening To Justice: Faithful Voices From The Abolitionist Past. Christopher Momany, who was the AC Chaplain, is one of the authors and the book has a very interesting connection to AC.
In 2015, a box of documents was found in a campus office and sent to Shipman Library, where librarian Noelle Keller discovered an unpublished manuscript dating back to 1839. It appeared to be the work of an American abolitionist and with further research by Chaplain Momany it was identified as the work of David S. Ingraham, one of the "Lane Rebels" who advocated abolition at the Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, OH and later transferred to Oberlin College, continuing their struggle against slavery.
Ingraham later traveled to Jamaica where he wrote much of the journal found in that campus office in 2015. It documented conditions of slavery there, including details and drawings of slave ships and much other valuable primary source documentation.
The journal immediately became an important resource for scholars around the globe working in this area, informing and enlightening their work. This book is an example of the scholarship that has and will continue to be developed from the Ingraham journal.
We are proud to house this important historical document in our Archive, and thank Keller and Momany for their efforts to sleuth out the details and promote the find.
If you're interested in reading the book, our copy is on the New Books shelves near the IT Helpdesk. The call number is E449.A98 2024.
Here's a link to a Daily Telegram article on the journal from 2022:
https://www.lenconnect.com/story/news/education/2022/11/12/abolitionist-journal-adrian-college-book/69619364007/
And here is a link to a digitized version of the journal:
https://shipmanlibrary.stacksdiscovery.com/sites/default/files/ingram_diary_small.pdf
