TIMOTHY PATRICK MCCARTHY and JOHN STAUFFER, editors. Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism. New York: New Press. 2006. Pp. xxxiii, 382. $22.95

Abstract

For some time, the idea that privileged white men created and drove forward the effort to win freedom for black slaves has been losing credibility. But the result, as Martin Duberman observes in the afterword to this important new collection, was that American abolitionism itself lost historical interest. Of course, over the past generation, historians of women and African Americans have shown that women and nonwhites fundamentally contributed to American antislavery agitation. Abolitionism's internationalism and roots in the eighteenth century are now also clear from a wealth of studies in Atlantic history. Nevertheless, there has not yet been a new synthetic treatment of abolitionism that absorbed this new work. The field has not yet been reconceived in terms of the social history of what we now realize to have been a multiracial and broad grass-roots movement with a long chronology. This important collection of essays, edited by Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer, admirably fills the gap.