Cover of book 'Nat Turner, Black Prophet'
Nat Turner, Black Prophet

A Visionary History

In August 1831, a group of enslaved people in Southampton County, Virginia, rose up to fight for their freedom. They attacked the plantations on which their enslavers lived and attempted to march on the county seat of Jerusalem, from which they planned to launch an uprising across the South. After the rebellion was suppressed, well over a hundred people, Black and white, lay dead or were hanged. As news of the revolt spread, it became apparent that it was the idea of a single man: Nat Turner. An enslaved preacher, he was as enigmatic as he was brilliant. He was also something more — a prophet, one who claimed to have received visions from the Spirit urging him to act.

Nat Turner, Black Prophet is the fullest recounting to date of Turner’s uprising, and the first that takes his divine visions seriously. The book traces their emergence from the world of nineteenth-century Methodism, with its revivals, camp meetings, interracial churches and Black preachers. 

With this work of narrative history, the late historian Anthony E. Kaye and his collaborator Gregory P. Downs, professor of history at UC Davis, give us a new understanding of one of the nineteenth century's most decisive events.

 

Access the book at Macmillan Publishers

Also available at Shields Library

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