A dynamic, timely background of nineteenth-century activists-free-lovers and socialists, abolitionists and vigilantes-and the social revolution they sparked in the turbulent Civil Battle era

“In the custom of Howard Zinn’s people’s histories, American Radicals reveals a forgotten yet inspiring past.”-Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of Margaret Fuller: A New American Lifestyle and Elizabeth Bishop: A Wonder for Breakfast

NAMED AMONG THE TEN BEST Background BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY about American Radicals: How Nineteenth-Century Protest Shaped the country SMITHSONIAN

On July 4, 1826, as Americans lit firecrackers to celebrate the country’s fiftieth birthday, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had been on their deathbeds. They would leave behind a groundbreaking political system and an evergrowing economy-as well as the glaring inequalities that experienced undermined the American experiment from its beginning. The young nation had outlived the guys who made it, but could it survive intensifying divisions over the meaning from the land of the free?

A fresh network of dissent-connecting firebrands and agitators on pastoral communes, in urban mobs, and in genteel parlors over the nation-vowed to finish the revolution they stated the founding fathers got only begun. These were women and men, dark and white, fiercely devoted to causes that pitted them against mainstream America whilst they fought to keep the nation’s founding ideals: the outstanding heiress Frances Wright, whose shocking critiques of religious beliefs and the institution of marriage resulted in demands her arrest; the radical Bostonian William Lloyd Garrison, whose dedication to nonviolence would be examined as the issue over slavery pushed the nation to its breaking point; the Philadelphia businessman James Forten, who presided within the first mass politics protest of free of charge African Americans; Marx Lazarus, a vegan from Alabama whose demands sexual liberation masked a dark top secret; black nationalist Martin Delany, the would-be founding dad of a Western African colony who secretly supported John Brown’s treasonous raid on Harpers Ferry-only to ally himself with Southern Confederates following the Civil War.

Though largely ignored today, these figures were enormously influential in the pivotal period flanking the battle, their lives and function entwined with reformers like Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Henry David Thoreau, aswell as iconic leaders like Abraham Lincoln. Jackson writes them back to the story of the nation’s most formative and perilous period in all their heroism, outlandishness, and tragic shortcomings. The result is a astonishing, panoramic work of narrative history, one that offers important lessons for our very own time.