American Radicals: How Nineteenth-Century Protest Shaped the Nation Audiobook (Free)

A dynamic, timely history of nineteenth-century activists-free-lovers and socialists, abolitionists and vigilantes-and the interpersonal revolution they sparked in the turbulent Civil War 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 Life and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast

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

On July 4, 1826, as People in america lit firecrackers to celebrate the country’s fiftieth birthday, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had been on the deathbeds. They would leave behind a groundbreaking politics system and a growing economy-as well as the glaring inequalities that got undermined the American test from its starting. The young country got outlived the men who managed to get, but could it survive intensifying divisions over the very meaning of the land of the free?

A new network of dissent-connecting firebrands and agitators on pastoral communes, in urban mobs, and in genteel parlors over the nation-vowed to complete the revolution they claimed the founding fathers got only begun. These were women and men, dark and white, fiercely specialized in causes that pitted them against mainstream America whilst they fought to keep the nation’s founding ideals: the amazing heiress Frances Wright, whose surprising critiques of religious beliefs and the institution of marriage resulted in demands her arrest; the radical Bostonian William Lloyd Garrison, whose commitment to nonviolence would be examined as the issue over slavery pushed the nation to its breaking point; the Philadelphia businessman James Forten, who presided over the first mass politics protest of free African Us citizens; Marx Lazarus, a vegan from Alabama whose calls for sexual liberation masked a dark magic formula; black nationalist Martin Delany, the would-be founding father 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 important in the pivotal period flanking the war, their lives and work entwined with reformers like Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Henry David Thoreau, aswell as iconic market leaders like Abraham Lincoln. Jackson writes them back into the story of the nation’s most formative and perilous era in every their heroism, outlandishness, and tragic shortcomings. The effect is a astonishing, panoramic work of narrative history, one that offers essential lessons for our very own time.