We have coming up. Later this week we have romance writer duo Christina Lauren here with boston globe on thursday. Next week on tuesday we are hosting former poet lawyer Robert Pinsky along with a few contributors for the new anthology the mind has cliff to fall, next wednesday we are hosting ncc usual the alice of boston history. He got many more events coming up and you can find more information on our website and in the brochures by the registers when you pick up your copy of the book tonight. Tonight we are so glad to be hosting Holly Jackson for her new book american radicals, how a 19thcentury protest shape the nation. But page magazine calls it magnificent calling abwho protested wrongs in their society deserve wide readership. Many find Academic Studies have cover the subjects here but this account written for a general audience is authoritative and fastpaced and visibly portrays a crucial period. In publisher weekly star review wrote electric, this is essential reading for anyone interested in how the u. S. Became what it is today. Holly jackson is an associate professor of english at the university of massachusetts boston. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, washington post, and boston globe, as well as a number of other scholarly venues. She is the author of one previous book a scholarly study of family values politics and 19th century American Literature and culture published by Oxford University press. She lives in cambridge massachusetts and we are so glad to have her here tonight. [applause] thank you for joining us. [applause] hi, thank you so much for coming out tonight. Its kind of a blustery wet night its so good to see you all. Its an absolute thrill to be here at Porter Square books which is my neighborhood bookstore and for those of us who live here it is such an Important Institution in our community so i really want to encourage you to make some purchases tonight i definitely think you should start by buying out their stock of american radicals but after that you should buy a cookbook and a book of poems and some childrens books and just support them, the holidays are around the corner. This book, my book, is a history of social justice activism in the United States from around 1817 to 1877 and if you are not regularly immersed in 19 century history, that can sound really remote. If you think of it as the civil war era or appeared a westward expansion or industrialization but the social issues that mattered at that time echo 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 by the idea of federal agents who were hunting refugees by sexual assaults on women by the d value realization of black lives, by and economic one percent that outside control of government. They were in a moment a very real political crisis. They were deeply concerned that the country is on the wrong track. They felt called to do something about it. They set out to accomplish specific legal reforms the legal reforms are kind of the 19th century activism were most familiar with but more portly i wanted to write about people who wanted a deeper cultural transformation. They wanted to reeducate the conscience of the American Public so it would see inequality as a moral failure and a national disgrace. They pursued this with a range of tactics protests look like a lot of things in this book it is individual lifestyle choices and Consumer Choices they figured out ways of exerting pressure on the economy and on Public Opinion and elected officials and the tactics went all the way up to attempted armed coups against the government. Theres kind of a paradoxical relationship with the nation is at the heart of this in the idea that they wanted to overthrow society and many of them were interested in actually overthrowing the government but they did this in the name of american political values. They saw themselves as the true heirs of the founders and thats a tension i tried to capture in the title and also that really informs the whole book. They saw themselves as engaged in a second American Revolution one of them called it a second and more glorious revolution. They thought of the first American Revolution that had been fought by their fathers and grandfathers. The book starts in the moment the founding generation was dying. Kind of a question about what the meaning and the direction of the nation would be Going Forward. They saw that first American Revolution as merely political, like important but political. The goal of it was to break away from england, to establish a new political system. But the people in my book thought that a social revolution was absolutely necessary as a followup in order to make good on the ideas that the admonition revolution had articulated but had never made real American Life. I think they succeeded is the argument i make to a surprising degree although incomplete certainly imperfect. I tried to show they were just responding to the relief singularly turbulent conditions of the period but the protest movements actually shape this period in a really sensual way. The first half the book the big story of the first of the book is that the rise of radical Antislavery Movement which was really the First Political project brought together americans across lines of race class and gender on a National Scale the rise of that movement inspired a much broader and textured critique in america. Once the institution of slavery, which was a centuriesold institution in the United States, it was completely the bases of the economy was supported at every level once that was called into question basically nothing was off the table for interrogation. We moved from the beginning of antislavery into a broader interrogation of religious observances, sex and marriage and family, private property and capitalism. The first part of the book i establish the network of activists that i will follow through the remainder of the century so the Network Includes leaders of free black communities in philadelphia and boston it includes the scottish air st. Francis right to exists incredibly charismatic character but ends up being really a cautionary tale it includes local hero William Garretson who is conventionally known as the leader of the Antislavery Movement headquartered here in boston. He did a much better job than francis right at the kind of intersectional and coalitional work im interested in in this book. Also in this part of the book you will find socialists on utopian communes, polyamorous begins another thing i really want to emphasize is this growing culture of dissent would met in this moment by a really reactionary mainstream opposition. That as people started to articulate a real resistance to the way things were, we see a huge backlash and its really in that conflict that i see them as drivers of history rather than just as responders. The second half of the book is all about the civil war and reconstruction which was obviously a real watershed moment in National History but i also talk about how it transformed these activists that im writing about as well. People who had been really visible pacifists for example, came to condone violence or even participate in violence there was a major riot of 50,000 people here in boston where a deputy federal agent was killed and the community here in boston had previously before that moment had been kind of defined by either working through political channels or working to these kind of moral suasion channels that were devoutly pass assist 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 of the book transformed in this period black nationalist Martin Delaney who had been ready to abandon the United States and create a project to take African Americans to make a new nation in west africa can make given the time he was among those who started to rally around ahe served and reconstruction government, he backed john browns raid before that so he had been willing to back an armed coup. This period in the spirit of reconstruction it was really an unprecedented opportunity for social reengineering it ended really tragically and violently especially for African Americans in the south and for workers. The figures i follow had accomplished so much that really seemed impossible. Most people in america thought it was impossible and crazy by the end of the period we do see a breakdown of their values or rethinking of some of their fundamental strategies and also, sadly, the splintering a lot of the coalitional relationships the coalitions between movements that had really defined their work. I end with a conclusion to the book that evaluates what they see us he succeeded with and also and just reviewed some of their Ambitious Goals that remain ours to pursue. Im going to read a short passage, i can read more after we talk if thats what you want to do. But this particular passage takes place in the late 1850s. Essentially right on the brink of the civil war ended set a big meeting of reformers in vermont. There are a lot of interesting settings in this book like freelove dance parties and communism and various things and a lot of that conventions where people would come out and just try to hammer out strategy and argue and i think this scene is fun because it captures the kind of wacky multiissue counterculture that i was really wanted to emphasize in this book about how we see ideas and personnel overlapping in movements that generally we study in isolation or think of as separate. I also like this moment because it shines a light as i try to do also on how those overlap in collaboration sometimes just could not work in practice because their interpersonal dramas and thats fine but on the other hand they were real and necessary in very significant disagreements about strategy and about priorities. Theres a lot in 19th century activist cultures that have been forgotten. I wanted to find those for you so you know what im saying when i get there. Spiritualism spiritualism was not a radical Political Movement they were kind of like fellow travelers. Outside of the passage is the only place we see them. You mightve heard in the 19th century that people were communicating with the dead, they were spirits coming around rapping on tables. Ouija boards, spirit medium, those are the spirituals. Free love, free love is a big subject in the book because all the way from the 1820s through the 1870s and it looked like a lot of Different Things there were a lot of varieties of it but basically it was a movement to reform or abolish the institution of marriage and it really overlapped with surprising degree with other movements like socialism and antislavery that i try to highlight. Nonresistance very important controversial strain of Antislavery Movement, they were radical pacifists but more than that they completely rejected the American Government they didnt want anything to do with the legal system they wouldnt vote, they wouldnt serve in the military they wouldnt deal with the court of law, they didnt recognize the American Government at all and it was really controversial within antislavery. And finally become outers. Come outers were also abolitionist. Their critique was religion and specifically the northern churches like they found it outrageous and appalling that northern churches were not at the absolute vanguard of evolution. They withdrew from their own churches but that really wasnt even enough. This one guy you will meet, stephen foster, was particularly famous for his direct action protests he would do on sunday mornings in which he would go into a church and sit with the congregation quietly to the beginning and then when the minister got up to Start Talking he would rise in the audience and just deliver a barn burning speech until people in the congregation grabbed him he was very tall and lanky he would just go limp they would have to carry him out, he was beat up, he was beat up every time. He was kicked, he was thrown out of a window. He went to jail. They made it a crime to interrupt his church service. In prior hampshire where he ordinarily was doing this but he did it anyway. Hes actually one of my very favorite figures in the book. In the last week of june 1858 they stepped off the trains into dazzling sunshine in the small but bustling town of rutland vermont, shorthaired women along here men sporting bloomers and bio encounters six is a smirking New York Times reporter with right there were medalist people of all sorts of shapes white, black, partially black, badly sunburned and convened to discuss abolitionism, free love, free trade and all other queer things. Finding the vacant lot on the east side of grove street about root beer and gingerbread from the locals who would set up booths around the perimeter and gathered under tents from 100 feet across decorated with buntings that say heavily in the airless heat. They talked all day and late into the evening abcolorful countercultural pipe skipping out of the woodwork times reporter claims to have walked into one gathering in hotel parlor just as a woman freestyle in poetry and accompanying herself on an antique accordion was interrupted by an adolescent in a trance and began flailing around the room. The conventions resolution affirmed their belief in Spirit Communications are rejected wore the Death Penalty and sabbath observances. They stated that the American Union was a crime in its formation and proved occurs ever since. The influence of the radical abolitionist was evident in the declarations and indeed among the first to speak was received write a founding nonresistance. As most impassioned remarks at a rutland convention pertain to sham marriages, abortions and gender politics of consensual consent. It turns out right chose to be abbecause he could not stand to be at home with his wife. No marriage love is between us. Many years since we slept in the same bed. Staying in other peoples homes as he traveled he was tortured by the sight of happy couples embracing newborns nursing and other blissful domestic scenes he was denied. He felt he was trapped in his marriage as in a living death. But travels presented other opportunities as well. Passionate affairs at least one and likely multiple women in europe led to question the traditional standards that deemed sexless marriage the only legitimate form of intimacy. By the time of the rutland convention and while still actively at work for the Antislavery Movement he published a book called marriage and parentage called for sex to be taken up as an object for full reform in movements like abolition and temperance. Extending his no Government Principles to private life right declares that no human law or license or authority or social custom can make a true marriage. His call at rutland for the immediate abolition of all external authority was a wide net cast to encompass not only the slave power but the government and the churches but the institution of marriage as well. All participants had their own causes to add to the list of external authorities to be abolished and they were practically climbing over one another for the floor. Spiritualists butting in after abimpassioned advocate for native americans tried valiantly to call attention to a recent massacre but could gain no traction with the crowd as it jumped from one topic to the next. Julia branch a vivacious resident of the manhattan commune was a star of the convention. For the New York Times reporter it produced an odd sensation to see a goodlooking woman rise and about herself free lever. She said women have bought and paid for as the negro athe feminist talk of marriage slavery was matched by others its a crying mental slavery spiritual slavery manned enslavement by religious conventions they seem to compete over which of these could be proved worse than the slavery of the body practice in the south Stephen S Foster the cantankerous, order was there as well listening intently to two days of such speeches. He had engaged in free love discussions with an open mind insisting that the real problem was gender inequality but granting is truly egalitarian marriage did not work for others the way it worked for him then he would support them in trying to experiment 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 outers spirit with which he arraigned inspecting Church Services the crash. He would not allow selfstyled reformers to feel comfortable while in the south continue to fall. Frankly disgusted by so much talk foster demanded action. My heart has been tamed and sunk within me as i listen to the discussion which the discussions which have been going on before this audience. I call upon you in the name of 4 million slaves to go to work he charged that when his listeners sit and chat about communications from beyond the grave they fall back to the cries of millions of living people bound in chains. How can they speak abstractly of womens rights, he wo