Review

"In an important and ground-breaking book, Husband has corralled a compelling basket of texts and arguments to support her case. There is much here for the amateur and the professional scholar alike."—Larry Hudson, Department of History, University of Rochester

“The writers Husband treats in Antislavery Discourse and Nineteenth-Century American Literature are the co-creators of our present progressive political discourse, their issues our issues: health care, diversity, civil rights…She understands the complexity and constraint of sentimentalist plots and logics in their writing, especially as they struggle to address their urgent social issues.”—Neil Schmitz, Professor of American Literature, SUNY-Buffalo

“A welcome fresh look…Tracing the afterlife of antislavery discourse beyond the Civil War, Husband succeeds in illuminating both the continuities between the ‘maternalist politics’ of antebellum and Progressive-era women reformers and the ‘paradigm shift’ Frederick Douglass initiated in civil rights agitation by rejecting sentimental images of broken families for embodiments of black masculinity.”—Carolyn L. Karcher, author of The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child

About the Author

Julie Husband is Associate Professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa.  She is co-author with Jim O’Loughlin of Daily Life in the Industrial United States: 1870-1900 and has published articles on a range of American authors.