Please join us for an author talk with Mark Kurlansky, who will be discussing his book, The Boston Way: Radicals Against Slavery & The Civil War. 

About The Boston Way:

Has there ever been good violence or a good war? The American Civil War is likely considered to be so since there seemed to be no alternative. Or was there? Before the war, Bostonian abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison correctly predicted that fighting would not bring about real freedom and justice. If emancipation came about through violence, he believed, it would take at least a century for Black people to get their rights. As we now know, it has taken even longer than that.

Here is the story of Garrison and other abolitionists, Black and white, male and female, who advocated a peaceful end to slavery and the start of human rights for Black people. The Boston Clique, as they were called, were victorious in persuading their fellow Bostonians to end Jim Crow laws on Massachusetts’ railroads. Persuasion was, these pacifists believed, the only means to lasting change.

In these pages, we find Frederick Douglass and lesser-known Black abolitionists, William Nell and Charles Remond. We meet leading feminists of the nineteenth century Lydia Maria Child, Margaret Fuller, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Additional key figures include Adin Balou, William Ladd, and Noah Worcester whose voices for nonviolence impacted Leo Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Dr. Martin Luther King.

Copies of The Boston Way will be sold at the event by The Bookstore of Gloucester!