Presented in partnership with the Boston Public Library, GBH Forum Network, and the Museum of African American History
Moderated by L’Merchie Frazier

In her latest work about social movements, the legal scholar, social historian, and best-selling author Linda Hirshman chronicles abolition – the social spirit, people, and political alliances that changed American history.

The overturning of slavery was an astonishing historical achievement, a crucial landmark in moral progress. Chronicling its origins in the Second Great Awakening, Linda Hirshman shows how the movement was fraught with tensions from within. Yet it moved forward, driven by a powerful activist triumvirate: printer William Lloyd Garrison, who was a core creator of the movement; Frederick Douglass, the charismatic former slave whose eloquence roused the nation; and the lesser-known Maria Weston Chapman, a Boston socialite whose copious and largely unexplored correspondence Hirshman fully examines. Don’t miss learning more about these key players, their New England story, and the political movement that fueled the Republican Party and, ultimately, the Civil War.

Linda Hirshman is a lawyer, social historian, and the best-selling author of, among other books, Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World. She has taught philosophy and women’s studies at Brandeis University and written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, The Atlantic, the Daily Beast, and POLITICO. As a labor attorney, she brought three cases in front of the Supreme Court and argued in all twelve U.S. Courts of Appeals.

L’Merchie Frazier is a visual activist and artist, historian and educator who is the Director of Education and Interpretation for the Museum of African American History Boston and Nantucket. She is a Boston Foundation Brother Thomas Fellow, Massachusetts Historical Society Ambassador Fellow, and Colonial Society member.