Employee owned bookstore. Before we begin tonight, later this week we have romance writer Christina Lauren with Meredith Goldstein on thursday, next week, we are hosting Robert Pinsky along with the mind and we are hosting nancys atlas of boston industry and more events coming up and we are demonstrating the registers when you pick up your copy of the books today. How night Stuart Russell present human compatible Artificial Intelligence and the problem of control american radicals how nineteenthcentury protest shaped the nation. This wellwritten overview of americans who protested wrongs in their society deserve a wide readership. Many fine Academic Studies have studied this but this account for a general audience is authoritative and portrays a crucial period. Publishers weekly in a stark review wrote electric. This is a central reading for anyone interested in how the us became what it is today. Holly jackson is associate professor at the university of massachusetts, her writing has appeared in the New York Times, washington post, boston globe and a number of other scholarly venues, shes the author of one previous book, scholarly study of family values, politics and 18thcentury American Literature published by Oxford University press. She lives in cambridge, massachusetts and we are glad to have you here tonight. Thank you for joining us. Hi, thanks so much for coming out tonight. It is a blustery wet night and so good to see you all. An absolute thrill to be here at cornerstone books, my neighborhood bookstore. Those who live here it is such an Important Institution in our community. I encourage you to make some purchases tonight. You should start by buying out their stock of american radicals how nineteenthcentury protest shaped the nation. And just support them. The holidays are right around the corner. This book, my book is a history of social justice, activism in the United States from 18171877 and if you are not regularly immersed in 19thcentury history that can sound really remote. If you think of it as the civil war era or period of western expansion, the social issues that mattered at that time ago so clearly still in our own moment that i think they will likely sound very familiar to you. The people who drive this story were americans who were outraged by family separation, the idea of federal agents who were hunting refugees, sexual assaults on women, the devaluation of black lives, and economic 1 that had outside control of the government. They were in a moment of real political crisis and were deeply concerned that the country was on the wrong track and they decided to do something about it so they went for specific legal reforms and i think the literal forms of the 19th century activism we are most familiar with but more important i wanted to write about people who want to the deeper cultural transformation. They wanted to reeducate the conscience of the American Public so they would see inequality as a moral failure and a National Disgrace so they had a range of tactics, protested a lot of things in this book, individual lifestyle choices, consumer choices, they figured out ways of exerting pressure on the economy and Public Opinion and on elected officials and the tactics went all the way to attempt armed coups against the government so theres a kind of paradoxical relationship with the nation at the heart of this. Many of them were interested in overthrowing the government but they did this in the name of american political values. They saw themselves as the era of the founders. I tried to capture that in the title and it informs the whole book. They saw themselves engaged in a second american revolution. They called it a more glorious american revolution. They thought of the First American revolution that was fought by their fathers and grandfathers, the book starts the moment the founding generation was dying. A question of the meaning and direction of the nation would be going forward. They saw the First American revolution is merely political, important but political. The goal was to break away from england to establish a new political system of the people in my book thought a social revolution was absolutely necessary as a followup in order to make good on the ideas the initial revolution had articulated but never made real in American Life and i think they succeeded is the argument i make, to a surprising degree though incomplete and imperfect. I tried to show that they werent just responding to the singularly turbulent conditions of the period but protest movements actually shaped this period and we should understand that. The first half of the book, the big story is the rise of radical Antislavery Movement which was really the First Political project that brought together americans across lines of race, class and gender on a National Scale and inspired a much broader and more textured culture of critique in antebellum america. Slavery was a centuriesold institution in the United States, the basis of the economy, it was supported at every level. Once that was called into question nothing was off the table for interrogation. So we moved from the beginning of antislavery into a broader interrogation of religious observances, sex, marriage and family, private property and capitalism so in this first part of the book i establish the network of activists that i will follow through the remainder of the century that includes leaders of free black communities in philadelphia and boston, a scottish air is named francis right, a charismatic character that ends up being a cautionary tale. Includes local hero William Garrison conventionally known as the leader of the Antislavery Movement that was headquartered in boston, he did a much better job with the intersectional and coalition that im interested in this book. Also youll find transcendentalists and socialists on utopian communes, pollyannas vegans and another thing i wanted to emphasize is the growing culture of dissent was met in this moment by a really reactionary mainstream oppositions that as people started to circulate a real resistance to the way things were we see huge backlash and it is in that conflict that i start i see them as drivers of history rather than just responders. The second half of the book is all about the civil war and reconstruction which was a real watershed moment in National History but i also talk about how it transformed these activists im writing about as well. For instance people who had been principled pacifists for example came to condone violence or even participate in violence. There was a major riot of 50,000 people in boston where deputy federal agent was killed and the community in boston had previously been defined by either working through political channels or through the use channels that were devoutly pacifist and that was a real changing of the guard moment that kicked off a very violent decade leading up to the civil war. Another example of a figure from the book who is transformed in this period, Martin Delaney who had been ready to abandon the United States and take africanamericans to make a new nation in north africa. Started to rally around the flag, served in the military, served in the reconstruction government, backed john brown before that, so this period in this period of reconstruction, and unprecedented opportunity for social reengineering but it ended tragically and violently especially for African Americans in the south and for workers in the north and out west. The figures that i follow had accomplished so much that seemed impossible. Most people in america thought was impossible and crazy. At the same time by the end of this period we see a breakdown of their values or a rethinking of their fundamental strategies and the splintering of a lot of the coalition all relationships, the coalitions that defined their work in the previous period so i end with conclusions evaluates what they succeeded with and their failures and reviewed some of their Ambitious Goals that remain hours to pursue. So i am going to read a short passage, 3 pages long and i can read more after words if that is what you want to do but this particular passage takes place in the late 1850s, essentially on the brink of the civil war at a big meeting of reformers in vermont. There are a lot of interesting settings in this book like freelove dance parties and communes and various things and conventions where people try to hammer out strategy and are you in the scene is fun because it captures a kind of wacky multiissue counterculture i really wanted to emphasize about how we see ideas and personnel overlapping in movements we generally study in isolation or think of as separate but i like this moment because it shines a light on how those overlaps and collaborations sometimes just could not work in practice because in one there are interpersonal dramas and that is fine but on the other hand there are real and necessary and significant disagreement about strategy and priorities and you will see that here. In the course of this short passage there are four terms that might be unfamiliar because there is a lot in 19 century activists culture that has been forgotten. I want to define those so you know what i am saying when i get there. Spiritualism. Spiritualism was not a radical political movement. They were like fellow travelers and they dont figure in this book significantly outside you may have heard in the 19th century that people were communicating with the dead, spirits wrapping on tables, ouija boards, the spirit medium, those are the spiritualists. Free love is a big subject in this book, goes all the way from the 1820s through the 1870s and it looked like a lot of things, there were a lot of varieties of it but it was a movement to reform or abolish the institution of marriage and it overlaps a surprising degree with other movements like socialism and antislavery that i try to highlight. A very important controversial strain of Antislavery Movement they were radical pacifists but more than that they completely rejected the American Government, didnt want anything to do with the legal system, they wouldnt vote, wouldnt serve in the military, wouldnt sue in a court of law, didnt recognize the American Government at all. It was very controversial within antislavery and the come outers were abolitionists. Their target of critique was religion and specifically the northern churches was they found it outrageous and appalling the northern churches were not the vanguard of abolition and so they withdrew from their own churches but that wasnt enough. This one guy, Stephen Foster was particularly famous for direction been protests he would do on sunday mornings in which he would go into a church and sit with the congregation quietly and when the minister got up to Start Talking he would rise and just deliver a barn burning until people in the congregation grabbed him, he was tall and lanky and he would go limp and they would have to carry him out. He was beat up every time, kicked, they tore his clothes off, he went to jail, they made it a crime to interrupt his Church Service in New Hampshire where he was doing this but he did it anyway. He is one of my favorite in the book. In the last week of june, 1858, they stepped off the train into dazzling sunshine in the small but bustling town of rutland, vermont, shorthaired women and longhaired men sporting bloomers and byron college, conspicuous hats and checkered suits the smirking New York Times reporter would write in his evening dispatch, people of all sorts of notions, white, black, partially black, badly sunburned, who convened to discuss abolitionism, specialism, freelove, freetrade and other things. Finding the vacant lot on the east side of grove street they bought root beer and gingerbread from locals who set up food around the perimeter and gathered under a tent 100 feet across decorated, sagging hairless we in the heat. They talks into the evening barely breaking from meals and musical interludes. Colorful countercultural types came out of the woodwork, the time supported claims to have walked into one gathering in hotel parlor is a woman was restyling poetry and accompanying herself on antique accordion was interrupted by an atlas and had a tramp began flailing around the room is mumbling messages from the departed spirit. The Convention Resolution from their belief in spirit communication, rejected war, the death penalty, they stated the American Union was a crime in its formation improve the curse ever since. The influence of radical abolitionists was evident in his declarations and the first to speak with henry c wright, a founder, but the most impassioned remarks pertained to sham marriages, abortion and the gender politics of sexual consent. It turns out right chose to be a champion of the antislavery cause because he he could not stand to be at home with his wife. He confided in his journal no marriage love is between us. It is many years since we slept in the same bed. Staying in other people at times as he traveled he was tortured by the site of happy couples, newborns nursing and other blissful domestic scenes that he was denied. He felt trapped in his marriage in a living death. His travels prevented other opportunities as well. Passionate affairs and multiple women in europe led him to question the traditional standards that sex in marriage was the only legitimate form of intimacy. By the time of the rebels convention and the Antislavery Movement he published a book called marriage and parentage that called for sex to be taken up as an object for soul reform in movements like abolition intemperance. Extending his no Government Principles to private life, right declares the no human law or license or authority or social custom can make a true marriage. His call for the immediate abolition of all external authority was a wide net cast to encompass not only the slave power, the government and churches but the institution of marriage as well. All participants in the convention had their own causes dad to this list of external authority to be abolished and they were practically climbing over one another for the floor. Spiritualists butting in after freethinkers, one uping abolitionists and patient advocate for native americans tried valiantly to call attention to a recent massacre but contain no traction with the crowd as a jump from one topic to the next. Julia branch, i vivacious resident of the manhattan commune was a star the convention. The New York Times reporter, it produced an odd sensation to be a goodlooking woman rise and about herself a free lover. She said women were bought and paid for is the negro slave is. The stamina stock of marriage lately was matched by others decrying mental slavery, spiritual slavery, manned enslavement by religious consent. They seems to computer for which of these could be proved worse, than the slavery body practiced in the south. Stephen foster, cantankerous come out or was there as well listening for two days to such speeches. He had engaged in freelove discussions with an open mind insisting the real problem was gender inequality but granting a cruelly a gala terry marriage did not work for others the way it worked for him and he would support them in trying an experiment of a different kind. By saturday afternoon foster was tired of listening to all this talk, not just tired, furious. He rose and addressed the convention in the same come out her spirit with which he harangued unsuspecting churchgoers at the sunday services he crashed. He would not allow the selfstyled reformers to feel comfortable while in the south the last continue to fall. Frankly discussed by so much talk foster demanded action. My heart has been pained and sunk within me as i have listened to the discussions which have been going on, he said. I call upon you in the name of 4 million slaves to go to work. He charged when his listeners sit and chat about communication from beyond the grave they called after the cries of millions of living people bound and chained. How could they speak abstractly of womens rights, he wonders in the very moment that enslaved women were being raped in newborn babies torn away from mothers, sold at auction with cattle and swine. The Free Convention threatened in fosters view to splinter activist energy into offshoots that seem to distressingly apolitical, doing nothing to save lives in end and just suffering. In response he made his commitment clear. Let me say here and now that i never intend to lay aside the question of slavery come what may return my eye from the slaves into the last shekel falls. Ending with a sanguinary note that was becoming inescapable in the late 1850s even in the rhetoric of devoted nonresistance he warned, i leave responsibly with you, god is my witness, if you go to the grave with this crime upon your soul my goal is fosters foreboding remarks lobbed into what had been a boisterous information to suggest something of the precipice on which they and the entire country teetered. In a few short years allamericans would be living in the shadow of mass death and the long crime of slavery would meet it end in apocalyptic bloodshed. They would soon be little time to debate who should be emancipated next when the National Crisis the abolitionists had long desired finally arrived. [applause] okay. Let me hear from you. What questions you have, what