Introduction: A second and more glorious revolution -- Part I. Foul oppression in the wind of freedom, 1817-1840. A tremendous no -- One bold lady-man -- O America, your destruction is at hand! -- To break every yoke -- Part II. Infidel utopian free lovers, 1836-1858. Coming out from the world -- Brook Farm on fire -- Wheat bread and seminal losses -- Marriage slavery and all other queer things -- Part III. Abolition war, 1848-1865. The aliened American -- Treason will not be treason much longer -- The provisional United States -- Under the flag -- Part IV. The radicals' reconstruction, 1865-1877. To write justice in the American heart -- A revolution going backwards -- This electric uprising -- Conclusion: On radical failure
Summary:
"A character-driven narrative history about the nineteenth-century radicals--from Fanny Wright and Henry David Thoreau to John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison--who demanded that the United States live up to its revolutionary ideals, and what their successes and failures can teach us today"-- Provided by publisher
In the 1800s, a new network of dissent-- connecting firebrands and agitators on pastoral communes, in urban mobs, and in genteel parlors across the nation-- vowed to finish the revolution they claimed the founding fathers had only begun. They were men and women, black and white, fiercely devoted to causes that pitted them against mainstream America even while they fought to preserve the nation's founding ideals. Jackson writes these largely forgotten figures back into the story of the nation's most formative and perilous era, and shows that they offers important lessons for our own time. -- adapted from jacket