American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation

Historian James G. Basker discusses his new book, a collection of writings reflecting our nation’s long, heated confrontation with that poisonous evil, slavery. This vast reservoir of abolitionist literature flowed from the pens of Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, anonymous editorialists, and freed slaves. Basker is the editor of a new book, American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation, published by the Library of America.

Basker is the Richard Gilder Professor in Literary History at Barnard College and president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.