American Radicals: How Nineteenth-Century Protest Shaped the Nation

American Radicals is a groundbreaking history of nineteenth-century activists who sparked a social revolution in the turbulent Civil War era.

This book reveals a forgotten yet inspiring past, connecting firebrands and agitators on pastoral communes, in urban mobs, and in genteel parlors across the nation.

From the brilliant heiress Frances Wright to the radical Bostonian William Lloyd Garrison, these men and women were fiercely devoted to causes that pitted them against mainstream America even while they fought to preserve the nation's founding ideals.

With a focus on the glaring inequalities that undermined the American experiment from its beginning, this book provides a dynamic and timely account of the social revolution that shaped the country's future.