The abolitionist movement fought to end slavery long before the Civil War. Abolitionists campaigned for freedom for enslaved people. Abolitionists used print materials, passionate speeches, and direct action to disrupt the racist system of slavery. Learn about abolitionist leaders such as Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, setbacks and victories for the movement, and the work abolitionists continue to inspire. Read WokeTM Books are created in partnership with Cicely Lewis, the Read Woke librarian. Inspired by a belief that knowledge is power, Read Woke Books seek to amplify the voices of people of the global majority (people who are of African, Arab, Asian, and Latin American descent and identify as not white), provide information about groups that have been disenfranchised, share perspectives of people who have been underrepresented or oppressed, challenge social norms and disrupt the status quo, and encourage readers to take action in their community.

“Traces the history of abolition from the 1600s to the 1860s . . . a valuable addition to our understanding of the role of race and racism in America.”—Florida Courier Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism and efforts to defend the rights of labor. Drawing on extensive archival research, including newly discovered letters and pamphlets, Sinha documents the influence of the Haitian Revolution and the centrality of slave resistance in shaping the ideology and tactics of abolition. This book is a comprehensive history of the abolition movement in a transnational context. It illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave’s cause to the struggle to redefine American democracy and human rights across the globe. “A full history of the men and women who truly made us free.”—Ira Berlin, The New York Times Book Review “A stunning new history of abolitionism . . . [Sinha] plugs abolitionism back into the history of anticapitalist protest.”—The Atlantic “Will deservedly take its place alongside the equally magisterial works of Ira Berlin on slavery and Eric Foner on the Reconstruction Era.”—The Wall Street Journal “A powerfully unfamiliar look at the struggle to end slavery in the United States . . . as multifaceted as the movement it chronicles.”—The Boston Globe

Oberlin, Hotbed of Abolitionism: College, Community, and the Fight for Freedom and Equality in Antebellum America

Newman traces the abolition movement's transformation from the American Revolution to 1830, showing how what began in late-18th-century Pennsylvania as an elite movement espousing gradual legal reform had by the 1830s become a radical, egalitarian mass movement based in Massachusetts.

A fresh synthesis of the abolitionist movement and ideas in the Anglo-American world.

This volume offers a pioneering study of slavery in the Italian states. Documenting previously unstudied cases of slavery in six Italian cities—Naples, Caserta, Rome, Palermo, Livorno and Genoa—Giulia Bonazza investigates why slavery survived into the middle of the nineteenth century, even as the abolitionist debate raged internationally and most states had abolished it. She contextualizes these cases of residual slavery from 1750–1850, focusing on two juridical and political watersheds: after the Napoleonic period, when the Italian states (with the exception of the Papal States) adopted constitutions outlawing slavery; and after the Congress of Vienna, when diplomatic relations between the Italian states, France and Great Britain intensified and slavery was condemned in terms that covered only the Atlantic slave trade. By excavating the lives of men and women who remained in slavery after abolition, this book sheds new light on the broader Mediterranean and transatlantic dimensions of slavery in the Italian states.

This book, the latest in the Seminar Studies in History series, examines the movement to abolish slavery in the US, from the origins of the movement in the eighteenth century through to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery in 1865. Books in this Seminar Studies in History series bridge the gap between textbook and specialist survey and consists of a brief "Introduction" and/or "Background" to the subject, valuable in bringing the reader up-to-speed on the area being examined, followed by a substantial and authoritative section of "Analysis" focusing on the main themes and issues. There is a succinct "Assessment" of the subject, a generous selection of "Documents" and a detailed bibliography. Stanley Harrold provides an accessible introduction to the subject, synthesizing the enormous amount of literature on the topic. American Abolitionists explores "the roles of slaves and free blacks in the movement, the importance of empathy among antislavery whites for the suffering slaves, and the impact of abolitionism upon the sectional struggle between the North and the South". Within a basic chronological framework the author also considers more general themes such as black abolitionists, feminism, and anti-slavery violence. For readers interested in American history.