Aired on Tuesday, March 30th.
Our guest is Dorothy Wickenden, an author and editor at The New Yorker Magazine. She tells us about her fascinating new book, which explores various interlinked facets of American history, including abolition, the Underground Railroad, the early women s rights movement, and the Civil War. As the noted Yale historian David W. Blight has written of this book: As a revolutionary, Harriet Tubman made many allies, none more important than her Auburn, New York, neighbors Martha Wright and Frances Seward. Wright, a middle-class Quaker, and Seward, the wealthy wife of a famous statesman, learned their activism from the abolition and women s rights movements that surrounded them, as well as from Tubman s incomparable example. This is a unique, lyrically written, exhaustively researched triple-biography of epic proportions about three women, mothers and organizers all, woven into a single narrative about their activist struggles before and during the Civil War.
Sebastián Hidalgo for Bates College Published on February 17, 2021
To Marshall Hatch Jr. ’10, the long painful moment in American history that is 2020 feels like Reconstruction revisited. Lately he’s been delving deep into the history of that period after the Civil War, “which at once was the highest high for African Americans,” he says, “and then the lowest low.”
In that era, Blacks held seats in Congress and in Southern legislatures, but angry white Southerners inflamed racial tensions chaos coupled with hope, American democracy at stake.
“The question during Reconstruction was, ‘What kind of country do we want to be?’” Hatch says. And the question arises again today. “These are incredible times to be living in,” Hatch says. “But there’s a lot to be dismayed about.”
During Black History Month in recent years, staff members of the UCF Libraries at the University of Central Florida have compiled a list of recommended titles by or about African Americans. Here are some of their selections.