On the cusp of the American Civil War, a new generation of reformers, including Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Martin Robison Delany and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, took the lead in the antislavery struggle. Frustrated by political defeats, a more aggressive Slave Power, and the inability of early abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison to rid the nation of slavery, the New Romantics crafted fresh, often more combative, approaches to the peculiar institution. Contrary to what many scholars have argued, however, they did not reject Romantic reform in the process. Instead, the New Romantics roamed widely through Romantic modes of thought, embracing not only the immediatism and perfectionism pioneered by Garrisonians but also new motifs and doctrines, including sentimentalism, self-culture, martial heroism, Romantic racialism, and Manifest Destiny. This book tells the story of how antebellum America's most important intellectual current, Romanticism, shaped the coming and course of the nation's bloodiest - and most revolutionary - conflict.
The Underground Railroad in an Important Juncture State Last month, at a Fourth of July barbeque, a bright teenager asked me a familiar question about my forthcoming book on American abolitionism. "Do you discuss the Underground Railroad?" he wondered. Although my monograph only addresses this topic in passing, his query did not come as a surprise. I have heard it countless times, for the Underground Railroad looms large in our nation's historical imagination. Fueled by romantic and often fanciful tales of hidden passageways, subterranean tunnels, and secret codes woven into "freedom quilts," the Underground Railroad has been a staple subject in social studies classrooms for decades. Students today can read about the heroic exploits of Harriet Tubman in countless juvenile biographies or pretend that they are an enslaved fourteen-year-old girl named Lucy on the run from slave catchers in the role-playing video game Mission U.S.: Flight to Freedom. Even the popular "American Girl" doll series turns to the Underground Railroad to dramatize the Civil War era, with their fugitive slave doll, Addy Walker. Until recently, academic historians have not evinced the same interest in the Underground Railroad. Unsure about its extent and effectiveness and wary of the self-serving stories spun by northern whites claiming to have been railroad "conductors," most scholars of the antebellum struggle over slavery have focused on other topics. Over the last decade, however, historians such as
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