'isms and 'ologies

Politics & History Abolitionism The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century movement to ban the institution of slavery. Sentiment against slavery had become widespread in England by the 1780s; led by Quakers, and with the support of Methodists and Baptists, the movement scored its first significant victory in 1807 with the passage of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. On August 1, 1834, all slaves in the English empire were emancipated. The first abolitionist society in America, the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, was founded in Philadelphia in 1775. Benjamin Franklin, an ambivalent slave owner (he arranged to have his slave freed upon his death but outlived him), was a member. Other prominent founding fathers, such as John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, advocated the elimination of slavery. George Washington, though sympathetic to their position, avoided committing himself to it publiclyhe, too, made arrangements to free his slaves in his will. But it wasn't until the 1820s and 1830s that, inspired by the preaching of Charles Grandison Finney (17921875) and other charismatic evangelical preachers and the journalism of William Lloyd Garrison (180579), the abolitionist movement reached critical mass. The American Anti-Slavery Society was organized in Philadelphia in 1833; James G. Birney (17921857) ran for president in 1840 and 1844 as the candidate of the abolitionist Liberty Party. In the mid-1840s both the Methodists and the Baptists split into Northern and Southern denominations over the issue; in 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe (181196) published Uncle Tom's Cabin. When Abraham Lincoln met her, he is reported to have said, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war." Afrocentrism A contemporary outgrowth of Pan-Africanism. Formulated in the early twentieth century, Pan-Africanism is the idea that black-skinned people around the worldthe African diasporaform a distinct nationality. This idea was promoted by black nationalists, such as Marcus Garvey (18871940), Malcolm X (192565), and adherents of the Nation of Islam, as well as more mainstream figures like W. E. B. DuBois (18681963). Temple University scholar Molefi Kete Asante coined the term Afrocentrism in 1980, which is the belief that African history and culture must be reexamined on their own terms, because they are necessarily distorted, suppressed, and marginalized when they are viewed through a Eurocentric, colonialist lens. Afrocentrists promote a positive view of African heritage, emphasizing the achievements of its civilizations, its unique spirituality, and its communal values. Though the holiday of Kwanzaa was created by the African American scholar Maulana Karenga in 1966, it is obviously a product of the same zeitgeist; the Howard University scholar Carter G. Woodson (18751950) created Negro History Week as early as 1926. Martin Bernal, a white professor emeritus at Cornell University who was a sinologist for most of his career (and who is the grandson of Sir Alan Gardiner, a towering Egyptologist of the last century), is one of the most visible and controversial advocates of Afrocentrist history today. In his multivolume work Black Athena (1987), he argues that the roots of classical Greek civilization are in the Semitic and black African cultures of the Middle East, among the latter of which he includes Egypt. Classical scholars have favored an Aryan view of Greek origins, he says, because of their unacknowledged racism and anti-Semitism. Anarchism From the Greek an (the absence of) and archos (authority; or a ruler), anarchy is a principled opposition to all but the most rudimental and noncoercive governments. Anarchism was first propouGoldwag, Arthur is the author of ''isms and 'ologies ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780307279071 and ISBN 0307279073.