| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Edward J. Robinson. To Save My Race from Abuse: The Life of Samuel Robert Cassius. (Religion and American Culture.) Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 2007. Pp. xii, 212. $39.95.

Frederick Douglass's choice of title for one of his final autobiographies, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), was important. The book was more than a recounting of individual experiences, exploits, and emotions: it was a tale of his times. It had the power to illuminate broader historical trends, to tell larger stories, to contain deeper social truths. Centering on individual examples, autobiographies and biographies can shed light on social structures. They can expose historical contours and curves. They can help us feel an entire period. As an autobiographer, Douglass was able to accomplish this because he had experienced so much in the realm of slavery and freedom. Removed from such direct encounters, biographers need a deep understanding of the realms inhabited by the individual. This usually results from breadth and depth of historical reading. The author should be able to see and feel the social, cultural, political, and economic world surrounding the events of the individual life. If not, biography becomes merely a recounting of events without broader meaning of the life. This is the case of Edward J. Robinson's study of minister, educator, missionary, and race man Samuel Robert Cassius. Although Robinson would like the reader to believe that Cassius exemplified the experiences of common African Americans more fully than Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, or Ida B. Wells, this biography fails to unveil much about the eras or the cultures in which Cassius moved.

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