Prophets of Protest

March 27, 2006
This collection of historical essays takes another look into what editors McCarthy and Stauffer—who both teach at Harvard—call the "maligned" and "misunderstood" role of abolitionists. The book argues that abolitionism was far from a movement dictated by elite, white men in Boston. Examining everyone from Midwesterners to women to free blacks, the authors of these essays tell the lesser-known stories of the abolitionists of various periods and places who created "one of the most diverse social movements in American history." One essay discusses a first generation of black abolitionists that later inspired Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, including businessman James Forten, who opposed resettling free blacks in Liberia. On radical John Brown, Karl Gridley argues that Brown's violent movement in Kansas was a genuinely moral struggle, not a cynical land grab, as some past historians have written; Hannah Geffert writes that Brown, contrary to many histories, did work with blacks, because he didn't believe the universal idea that blacks were as "submissive as Uncle Tom." This is a dense book written by scholars, but it's a worthy read for anyone interested in an insightful re-examination of the battle for abolition.

April 1, 2006
Perspectives on abolitionists have changed over the generations, reflecting the changes in perspective on race--and class and gender--in America. This collection of essays by historians explores how scholarship on abolitionism has expanded beyond portraits of influential white males to blacks and women, beyond the historically assigned beginnings with William Lloyd Garrison in 1831 back to the American Revolution, and beyond U.S. soil to Britain. Contributors cite in the abolitionist fervor the nascent black-nationalist and feminist movements and offer new perspectives on prominent figures, including Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, as well as reflections in popular culture, then and now. The book is organized into four parts: revisions, showing how histories of abolitionism have evolved; origins, examining how the movement began and its interracial features; revolutions, focusing on John Brown; and representations, the rhetorical and aesthetic strategies employed to win hearts and minds to the cause. Though written by leading historians, the collection is highly accessible to general readers and offers a fresh perspective on the most powerful social movement of the nineteenth century.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)