Please join us for a conversation and Q&A with Mary T. Freeman on her new book, Abolitionists and the Politics of Correspondence.
Abolitionists and the Politics of Correspondence examines how opponents of slavery harnessed the power of letter writing to further their political aims, arguing that this practice enabled a disparate and politically marginal assortment of people to take shape as a coherent and powerful movement.
Mary T. Freeman serves as the Dr. John W. Hakola History Professor at the University of Maine.
The event is a collaboration of the Columbia University and Slavery Project and the Lehman Center for American History.
"American abolitionism—the greatest social movement of the nineteenth century—relied on networks of activists. And until now no one has studied how those activists wrote the letters that made these networks possible. Mary T. Freeman’s Abolitionists and the Politics of Correspondence will be the definitive study of the epistolatory practices of American abolitionists. In this elegantly written and exhaustively researched book, Freeman shows how abolitionists—both famous and unknown—used the written letter to make connections, argue doctrine, sustain each other’s morale, and coordinate the movement."—Peter Wirzbicki, Princeton University