Saturday Review: “History, Memoir, and Novel,” a review by E. Thomson Shields, Jr. of Approaches to Teaching Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl edited by Lynn Domina (2024) in NCLR Online Spring 2026
File this under our ongoing project to highlight and encourage the use of North Carolina books in classrooms. Shields’ review covers how this one book–Domina’s–emphasizes all the different ways Jacobs’ book can be taught. He writes:
“A major strength of Approaches to Teaching Jacobs is its interdisciplinary approach, connecting Incidents to historical studies, cultural studies, and literary studies, including the techniques of fiction. An incomplete list of fields identified as being used in the collection’s twenty-seven essays includes African American literature; African American studies; American literature; American studies; American print culture; archival studies; Black feminist theory; composition, writing, and rhetorical theory; creative writing; digital humanities; environmental humanities; literature and medicine; modern American and Canadian fiction; multicultural American literature; pedagogy; performance studies; religious studies; social work; Victorian literature; visual studies; women’s literature; and women and gender studies.”
Any teacher knows how important it is to engage students by presenting multiple ways the study material relates to either other classes and/or their actual lived experiences. Shields concurs, “By showing the variety of themes in Incidents and the various texts Incidents can be read alongside, as well as the numerous ways the work has been successfully taught, Approaches to Teaching Jacob is a useful work for anyone thinking about how to interpret Jacobs’s autobiography.”
You can read the full review in NCLR Online Spring 2026 issue here, and add Approaches to Teaching Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to your classroom.
