Books by Albert J. von Frank

Before 1854, most Northerners managed to ignore the distant unpleasantness of slavery. But that year an escaped Virginia slave, Anthony Burns, was captured and brought to trial in Boston. This is the story of Burns's trial and of how it revolutionized the moral and political climate in Massachusetts and sent shock waves through the nation.

This book is a meditation on the theme of provincialism in American literature. With careful attention to the historical context, it identifies in the expressions of pre-Civil War writers certain qualities of self-doubt and defensiveness, certain perceptions of displacement and decline, so characteristic as to amount to a defining trait of American literature.