Emancipation
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Emancipation. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
Proclamation of, in American history, a state document setting free all slaves of such states and parts of states as were in rebellion against the authority of the national government. It was made January 1, 1863. It was issued by President Lincoln as a military measure, acting in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the army and navy. It set free all slaves in Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana (except certain parishes including the city of New Orleans ), Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina , North Carolina , and Virginia,-- West Virginia and certain counties excepted. The slaves were enjoined to "labor faithfully for reasonable wages wherever they were permitted to do so." It was written New Year's morning by President Lincoln in his own hand. The penmanship is firm and neat. The signature is scraggly. The president explained that he was not particularly agitated when he signed, but that a stream of New York callers had come in ere he completed the task, and that his grasp of the pen had become tremulous through excessive handshaking. The official proclamation was, of course, drawn up at the State Department. The original copy on four sheets of foolscap was presented to the managers of a fair held in Chicago for the benefit of the soldiers. It sold for $3,000. It was destroyed in the great Chicago fire. Fortunately photographic copies are in existence. The memorable pen, a steel affair in a plain colored cedar handle--the two together not worth to exceed six cents--passed into the hands of a citizen of Boston. See Negro ; Lincoln
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the act by which in the Roman law, the paternal authority was dissolved in the lifetime of the father. It took place in the form of a sale by the father of the son to a third party, who manumitted him. The Twelve Tables required that this ceremony should be gone through three times, and it was only after the third sale that the son came under his own law. In general, the son was at last resold to the father, who manumitted him, and thus acquired the rights of a patron which would otherwise have belonged to the alien purchaser who finally manumitted him. In the case of daughters and grandchildren one sale was sufficient. In the law of EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION 6 Scotland, emancipation is called forisfamiliation. The Roman Catholic Emancipation Act was the act, signed April 13, 1829, which removed the most galling of the Roman Catholic disabilities in England.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 account of the Proclamation of January 1, 1863 still stands in its essentials, including the loss of Lincoln's handwritten original in the Chicago fire of 1871; what has shifted is emphasis. Historians now stress that the decree freed no one on the day it was signed in areas still under Confederate control, and that emancipation was completed only by the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865 — with the news reaching Texas on June 19, 1865, a date made a United States federal holiday, Juneteenth, in 2021. Collier's 1921 note that the 1829 Act removed "the most galling" Catholic disabilities was carefully worded, because some survived: not until the Succession to the Crown Act of 2013 could an heir to the British throne marry a Roman Catholic without losing place in the line. Collier's Roman-law sense of the word is now largely historical; in modern usage "emancipation" most often means a court freeing a minor from parental authority.
Written for this edition, 2026.