Love Across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass

In this nuanced, sympathetic interpretation of two extraordinary lives, Maria Diedrich acquaints us with an important and little-known relationship. Ottilie Assing, an intrepid German journalist, met and interviewed Frederick Douglass in 1856, and it was an encounter that transformed the lives of both. Diedrich reveals in fascinating detail their intimate twenty-eight-year relationship, their shared intellectual and cultural interests, and their work together on Douglass's abolitionist writings. Love Across Color Lines is a profound meditation on nineteenth-century racial, class, and national boundaries, and offers new insights into the career of a preeminent American leader.

Maria Diedrich, born in 1950, is a professor of American studies at the University of Mnster, Germany. Since 1984, she has been a Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University.