Like many readers, I am fascinated by strong creative women in the past and how their lives can inspire women today. As an academic, before my Creative Writing Diploma and transformation to a creative writer, I taught historical novels of many kinds. I now enjoy devising fascinating women whose lives have significant importance for today’s issues. To talk about my favourite historical figure Virginia Woolf, I have had invitations from galleries and universities around the world, including several in the US and Europe, as well as Brazil, Egypt, Israel, Mexico, and Norway. France Culture and Arte TV, and Turkey TRT Television also featured my writing.
Winner of the Historical Writers’ Association Debut Crown Award, Blood & Sugar is a page-turner of a crime thriller set in London and Greenwich 1781. Captain Harry Corsham must discover why his old friend the abolitionist Tad Archer was murdered. Corsham’s quest may do irreparable damage to the slave trade. I live in Greenwich, much of which is unchanged architecturally since the eighteenth century. Walking the streets portrayed in the novel brings alive that world. Slave trade monuments are currently being taken down in the UK and US and Blood & Sugar depicts the beginnings of that emotional and necessary journey.
'A page-turner of a crime thriller . . . This is a world conveyed with convincing, terrible clarity' C. J. Sansom
Blood & Sugar is the thrilling debut historical crime novel from Laura Shepherd-Robinson.
June, 1781. An unidentified body hangs upon a hook at Deptford Dock - horribly tortured and branded with a slaver's mark.
Some days later, Captain Harry Corsham - a war hero embarking upon a promising parliamentary career - is visited by the sister of an old friend. Her brother, passionate abolitionist Tad Archer, had been about to expose a secret that he believed could cause irreparable…
David S. Reynolds is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author or editor of 16 books, on subjects that include John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman Andrew Jackson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the literary and popular culture of the American Renaissance. He is the winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Lincoln Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Book Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, the Christian Gauss Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
This skillfully edited anthology of contemporary responses to Brown lets us experience firsthand the controversies surrounding Brown during his lifetime. Reprinted in this volume are dozens of 19th-century writings--letters, speeches, articles, poems, diary entries--that demonstrate just how central John Brown was to the cultural and political life of his time. Included in the book are writings about Brown by some of the century's most notable people: Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Henry Ward Beecher, Jefferson Davis, Herman Melville, Stephen Douglas, Louisa May Alcott, Victor Hugo, and Karl Marx, to name a few.
When John Brown led twenty-one men in an attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry on October 16, 1859, he envisioned a biblical uprising of millions of armed bondsmen, thus ridding the nation of the scourge of slavery. The insurrection did not happen, and Brown and the other surviving raiders were quickly captured and executed. This landmark anthology, which collects contemporary speeches, letters, newspaper articles, journals, poems, and songs, demonstrates that Brown's actions nonetheless altered the course of American history.
John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd have assembled an impressive and wide-ranging collection of responses to Brown's raid: Brown's own…
David S. Reynolds is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author or editor of 16 books, on subjects that include John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman Andrew Jackson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the literary and popular culture of the American Renaissance. He is the winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Lincoln Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Book Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, the Christian Gauss Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
John Brown was a devout Calvinist who believed that God had chosen him to fight against slavery. In this stimulating book, Decaro provides us with the first full-scale religious biography of Brown, placing him in the context of nineteenth-century revivals and religiously inspired abolitionists. Decaro also explores Brown’s closeness to African Americans and his debt to Black militants such as David Walker, Denmark Vesey, and Henry Highland Garnet.
Reveals a complex new portrait of John Brown, radical abolitionist and leader of the 1859 raid on Harper's Ferry
John Brown is usually remembered as a terrorist whose unbridled hatred of slavery drove him to the ill-fated raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. Tried and executed for seizing the arsenal and attempting to spur a liberation movement among the slaves, Brown was the ultimate cause celebre for a country on the brink of civil war.
"Fire from the Midst of You" situates Brown within the religious and social context of a nation steeped in racism, showing his roots in…
David S. Reynolds is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author or editor of 16 books, on subjects that include John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman Andrew Jackson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the literary and popular culture of the American Renaissance. He is the winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Lincoln Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Book Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, the Christian Gauss Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
First published in 1909, this succinct biography by a leading Black author and reformer spearheaded a tradition of appreciative commentary on Brown by African Americans. Brushing aside longstanding critiques of John Brown as a fiend, a fanatic, and a traitor, Du Bois explores the depth of Brown’s antislavery commitment and his willingness to sacrifice his own life in order to bring about the emancipation of Amerca’s 4 million enslaved people. Du Bois makes the memorable generalization: “John Brown was right.”
A moving cultural biography of abolitionist martyr John Brown, by one of the most important African-American intellectuals of the twentieth century.
In the history of slavery and its legacy, John Brown looms large as a hero whose deeds partly precipitated the Civil War. As Frederick Douglass wrote: "When John Brown stretched forth his arm ... the clash of arms was at hand." DuBois's biography brings Brown stirringly to life and is a neglected classic.
I’m a historian of empire, with a particular interest in the British Empire, colonial violence, and the ways in which imperialism is shown and talked about in popular culture. I studied at Oxford University, and having lived in and travelled around much of the Middle East, South Asia and Africa, I am always trying to understand a bit more if I can… but reading is best for that… My first book was The Khyber Pass.
A landmark work by virtue of being the first book by a black woman to be published in Britain, this is a powerfully harrowing account of Mary’s own life as a slave in the Caribbean. Though only short, it supplies valuable testimony on the gruesome British exploitation of enslaved people over the centuries, and the many cruelties inflicted upon Mary personally by her brutal ‘owners’. Should be required reading for all those who think of the British Empire with nostalgia.
Mary Prince was born into slavery in Devonshire Parish, Bermuda. While she was later living in London, her autobiography, The History of Mary Prince, was the first account of the life of a black woman to be published in the United Kingdom. This edition of "The History of Mary Prince" is Volume 4 of the Black History Series. It is printed on high quality paper with a durable cover.
For a long time, I’ve been intrigued by the different ways that people reason about moral issues. Add to that a mystification about why smart people do unethical things and you have the basis for our book on ethical leadership. I’ve spent the better part of my career evaluating and coaching potential leaders and realized relatively recently that I wanted to work with people who did the “right thing.” Demonstrating the moral courage to speak up in the face of opposition has become increasingly difficult—hence my list of books on moral courage. I hope you enjoy it.
I’ll admit it—there is a theme here. One of the great eras for moral courage was the pre-Civil War United States, when slavery, women’s rights, immigration, and upheaval were constant.
William Lloyd Garrison was one of my heroes of the time. I love a voice that cries out, “I will be heard,” against the norms of society. Advocating for the immediate abolition of slavery, Garrison became the moral, vocal conscience of his times.
Widely acknowledged as the definitive history of the era, Henry Mayer's National Book Award finalist biography of William Lloyd Garrison brings to life one of the most significant American abolitionists. Extensively researched and exquisitely nuanced, the political and social climate of Garrison's times and his achievements appear here in all their prophetic brilliance. Finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the J. Anthony Lucas Book Prize, winner of the Commonwealth Club Silver Prize for Nonfiction.
I spent many a night growing up glued to the television, watching Ken Burns’ Civil War. But as I got older, I found my interests stretching beyond the battles and melancholic music on the screen. I decided to become a historian of abolitionism–the radical reform movement that fought to end the evils of slavery and racial prejudice. Through my research, I seek to explain the substantial influence of the abolitionist movement as well as its significant limitations. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 2017, and have since held positions at such institutions as The New School, the University of Bonn, and the Massachusetts Historical Society.
This book demonstrates a point that I always try to make to students: the antislavery movement was much more than mass meetings and heroic escapes along the Underground Railroad.
It was far more complex–and, at times, far more violent. Many Black activists in the years before the Civil War turned to the tactics of violence to try and shake a complacent nation into action. They did so in desperation, and only with much anguish–and much controversy.
Jackson's book gets deep into the weeds of how the struggle for antislavery progress actually worked.
From its origins in the 1750s, the white-led American abolitionist movement adhered to principles of "moral suasion" and nonviolent resistance as both religious tenet and political strategy. But by the 1850s, the population of enslaved Americans had increased exponentially, and such legislative efforts as the Fugitive Slave Act and the Supreme Court's 1857 ruling in the Dred Scott case effectively voided any rights black Americans held as enslaved or free people. As conditions deteriorated for African Americans, black abolitionist leaders embraced violence as the only means of shocking Northerners out of their apathy and instigating an antislavery war.
In Force…
I’ve been interested in exploring the characteristics and meaning of heroines in history since I met two fellow travelers in Nova Scotia in 1990 who introduced me to the work of Joseph Campbell and his The Hero with a Thousand Faces. As a history professor I am interested in women’s changing place in society and the history of heroines is an excellent way to explore this. I am passionate about moving beyond individual, celebratory stories to instead explore themes for a dynamic modern archetype of a heroine across time and cultures. I like to imagine a time when all humans can be heroes without the feminine suffix.
Autobiographies and narratives by heroines make for powerful reading and offer welcome wisdom.
Feminist and abolitionist Sojourner Truth’s story involves fighting sexism and racism out of first-hand experience and adversity. This book reminds us of the diversity present in the history of feminist heroines rather than the often privileged white, middle-class women’s voices.
Truth’s legendary ‘Ain’t I a woman?’ speech was delivered at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.
Narrative of Sojourner Truth, A Northern Slave is a powerful, landmark narrative originally published in 1850 by abolitionist and preacher Sojourner Truth, who was born a slave in 1797 in rural New York. Truth was a nationally recognized proponent of civil rights and women's rights, speaking widely about gender and racial inequities. Narrative of Sojourner Truth, A Northern Slave is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the history of slavery and its cruel hardships in the United States.
Throughout my life, I have been fascinated by religion, initially in struggling with individual belief and later with its place within the social and political world. As a bioethicist, I studied and worked with patients and practitioners as they dealt with religious and moral concerns in healthcare. Then, as an international human rights advocate, educator, and governance development practitioner, I engaged with people of faith and secularists in the struggle to protect human rights and dignity as well as to attempt to promote peacebuilding in the post-conflict areas in which I worked, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Cote d’Ivoire.
In the 1990s, Stephen Carter wrote a trilogy of works on religion and politics. In the first two, he criticizes the idea of a “wall of separation” approach to religious freedom that many have viewed as being hostile toward the discussion of religious beliefs in the public sphere, and he argues that religion supports informed moral debate over issues of public policy.
In this book, Carter returns to “the wall,” but this time, he adopts the thinking of John Winthrop, who viewed the wall of separation as a means of protecting religion from the corrupting influences of politics and power–not protecting the state from religion.
I find this of particular value as it has been absent from most recent conversations on this topic. As with Jon Meacham, Carter’s writing is eloquent, well-argued, engaging, and free of vitriol.
Stephen Carter argues that American politics is unimaginable without America's religious voice. Using contemporary and historical examples, from abolitionist sermons to presidential candidates' confessions, he illustrates ways in which religion and politics do and do not mesh well and ways in which spiritual perspectives might make vital contributions to our national debates. He also warns us of the importance of setting out some sensible limits, so that religious institutions do not allow themselves to be seduced by the lure of temporal power, and offers strong examples of principled and prophetic religious activism for those who choose their God before their…
Abolition sounds destructive, obliterating. But abolition has always been about liberation and change, indeed revolution.
This is the core message of this illuminating manifesto written as if on the barricades: ‘Abolition is a tool to re-imagine revolutionary politics.’ In a wide-ranging set of arguments (theses) and countless stories of transformative activities, Aviah Sarah Day and Shanice Octavia McBean show us how revolutionary we might all become.
George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis triggered abolitionist shockwaves. Calls to defund the police found receptive ears around the world. Shortly after, Sarah Everard's murder by a serving police officer sparked a national abolitionist movement in Britain. But to abolish the police, prisons and borders, we must confront the legacy of Empire.
Abolition Revolution is a guide to abolitionist politics in Britain, drawing out rich histories of resistance from rebellion in the colonies to grassroots responses to carceral systems today. The authors argue that abolition is key to reconceptualising revolution for our times - linking it with materialist feminisms, anti-capitalist class…
