Prophets Of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism

The campaign to abolish slavery in the United States was the most powerful and effective social movement of the nineteenth century and has served as a recurring source of inspiration for every subsequent struggle against injustice. But the abolitionist story has traditionally focused on the evangelical impulses of white, male, middle-class reformers, obscuring the contributions of many African Americans, women, and others.

Prophets of Protest, the first collection of writings on abolitionism in more than a generation, draws on an immense new body of research in African American studies, literature, art history, film, law, women's studies, and other disciplines. The book incorporates new thinking on such topics as the role of early black newspapers, antislavery poetry, and abolitionists in film and provides new perspectives on familiar figures such as Sojourner Truth, Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown.

With contributions from the leading scholars in the field, Prophets of Protest is a long overdue update of one of the central reform movements in America's history.

Timothy Patrick McCarthy is a lecturer on history and literature and on public policy at Harvard University, where he directs the Sexuality, Gender, and Human Rights Program at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. An award-winning scholar, teacher, and activist, he is a co-editor, with John McMillian, of The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition and of Protest Nation: Words That Inspired a Century of American Radicalism; a co-editor, with John Stauffer, of Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism; and the editor of The Indispensable Zinn: The Essential Writings of the ”People's Historian”, all published by The New Press. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

John Stauffer is a professor of English, American studies, and African American studies at Harvard University. He writes and lectures on the Civil War era, antislavery, social protest movements, and photography. He is the co-editor, with Timothy Patrick McCarthy, of Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (The New Press). He is also the author or editor of numerous other books and more than sixty articles, including two books that were briefly national bestsellers: Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (2008), which won the Iowa Author Award and a Boston Authors Club Award and has been translated into Mandarin, Arabic, and Korean; and State of Jones (2009), co-authored with Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins. His first book, The Black Hearts of Men (2002), won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize and Avery Craven Book Prize, and was the runner-up for the Lincoln Prize. His essays and reviews have appeared in Time, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, the New Republic, Raritan, and numerous scholarly journals and books. In 2009 Harvard named him the Walter Channing Cabot Fellow for “achievements and scholarly eminence in the fields of literature, history or art.”
He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Deborah Cunningham, and their two children, Erik and Nicholas.