A record of the life of writer Lydia Maria Child and her crusades for human rights and equality.

"Taking its title from the accolade William Lloyd Garrison bestowed on Child - "she is the first woman in the republic"--This innovative cultural biography recreates the world as well as the life of a major nineteenth-century figure whose career encompassed issues central to American history. Carolyn L. Karcher captures the throes of a tumultuous era that saw the mass transfer of many Native tribes, ferocious mob violence against abolitionists and African American communities, bitter dissension among reformers over tactics and principles, a dramatic transformation in women's lives, a Civil War unprecedented not only for its carnage but also for its character as a liberation struggle, and a tragically aborted Reconstruction. She explores the key role Child played in shaping American culture at a formative moment in its development and reveals her impact on almost every facet of nineteenth-century letters. She also takes readers into the private life of a complex woman, riven by deep con

"Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) was for a time one of America's most beloved authors, known for household manuals and children's poems, including the immortal "Over the River and Through the Wood." But in 1833, having converted to the abolitionist cause, Child published An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, the first book-length condemnation of slavery printed in the United States. Child's book created an immediate uproar and catapulted her into the life of an activist. Lydia Maria Child became one of the most consequential radicals of nineteenth-century America. In this biography of Child, Lydia Moland foregrounds Child's struggles of conscience and the meaning they held for her life-and, potentially, for ours. In her first career, Lydia Maria Child achieved what almost no woman in history had before--she was a self-sufficient female author. What, then, made her throw it all away to write An Appeal? The scandal of that book caused sales of her other books to pl

A biography of the woman who risked her success in the male-dominated literary world of nineteenth-century America to become a passionate advocate for the abolition of slavery.

"Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) wrote or edited more than fifty works between 1824 and 1878, including historical novels, domestic manuals, biographies of famous women, transcendental essays, and groundbreaking abolitionist texts. Her career was influenced by intimate ties to Boston Brahmin George Ticknor, abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, Maria Chapman, and the Grimke sisters, and transcendentalists Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Convers Francis, Child's brother. Although her work has been overshadowed by more prominent contemporaries, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Child has emerged as a figure central to any cultural analysis of antebellum America. In Cultural Reformations, Bruce Mills examines how Child, centrally connected to major literary and social reforms, strove to redefine cultural boundaries concerning race and gender."--BOOK JACKET. "By juxtaposing Child's representative works with such cultural documents of the period as private correspondence, sermons, and

"Covenant and Republic investigates the cultural politics of historical memory in the early American republic, specifically the historical literature of Puritanism. By situating historical writing about Puritanism in the context of the cultural forces of republicanism and liberalism, this study reconsiders the emergence of the historical romance in the 1820s, before the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Covenant and Republic not only aids the Americanist recovery of this literary period, but also brings together literary studies of historical fiction and historical scholarship of early republican political culture; in doing so, it offers a persuasive new account of just what is at stake when one reads literature of and about the past."--Jacket.