BiblioVault - Books about Child, Lydia Maria

Lydia Maria Child

University of Massachusetts Press

Published in Boston in 1833, Lydia Maria Child's Appeal provided the abolitionist movement with its first full-scale analysis of race and slavery. Indeed, so comprehensive was its scope, surveying the institution from historical, political, economic, legal, racial, and moral perspectives, that no other antislavery writer ever attempted to duplicate Child's achievement. The Appeal not only denounced slavery in the South but condemned racial prejudice in the free North and refuted racist ideology as a whole.

Child's treatise anticipated twentieth-century inquiries into the African origins of European and American culture as well as current arguments against school and job discrimination based on race.

This new edition--the first oriented toward the classroom--is enhanced by Carolyn L. Karcher's illuminating introduction. Included is a chronology of Child's life and a list of books for further reading.

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An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans

Revised and Updated Edition

Lydia Maria Child, Edited with an introduction by Carolyn L. Karcher

University of Massachusetts Press, 2023

Published in Boston in 1833, Lydia Maria Child’s An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans provided the abolitionist movement with its first full-scale analysis of race and enslavement. Controversial in its own time, the Appeal surveyed the institution of slavery from historical, political, economic, legal, racial, and moral perspectives and advocated for the immediate emancipation of the enslaved without compensation to their enslavers. By placing American slavery in historical context and demonstrating how slavery impacted—and implicated—Americans of all regions and races, the Appeal became a central text for the abolitionist movement that continues to resonate in the present day.

This revised and updated edition is enhanced by Carolyn L. Karcher’s illuminating introduction, a chronology of Child’s life, and a list of books for further reading.

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The First Woman in the Republic

A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child

Carolyn L. Karcher

Duke University Press, 1998

For half a century Lydia Maria Child was a household name in the United States. Hardly a sphere of nineteenth-century life can be found in which Lydia Maria Child did not figure prominently as a pathbreaker. Although best known today for having edited Harriet A. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, she pioneered almost every department of nineteenth-century American letters—the historical novel, the short story, children’s literature, the domestic advice book, women’s history, antislavery fiction, journalism, and the literature of aging. Offering a panoramic view of a nation and culture in flux, this innovative cultural biography (originally published by Duke University Press in 1994) recreates the world as well as the life of a major nineteenth-figure whose career as a writer and social reformer encompassed issues central to American history.

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Lydia Maria Child

A Radical American Life

Lydia Moland

University of Chicago Press, 2022

Now in paperback, a compelling biography of Lydia Maria Child, one of nineteenth-century America’s most courageous abolitionists.

By 1830, Lydia Maria Child had established herself as something almost unheard of in the American nineteenth century: a beloved and self-sufficient female author. Best known today for the immortal poem “Over the River and through the Wood,” Child had become famous at an early age for spunky self-help books and charming children’s stories. But in 1833, Child shocked her readers by publishing a scathing book-length argument against slavery in the United States—a book so radical in its commitment to abolition that friends abandoned her, patrons ostracized her, and her book sales plummeted. Yet Child soon drew untold numbers to the abolitionist cause, becoming one of the foremost authors and activists of her generation.

Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life tells the story of what brought Child to this moment and the extraordinary life she lived in response. Through Child’s example, philosopher Lydia Moland asks questions as pressing and personal in our time as they were in Child’s: What does it mean to change your life when the moral future of your country is at stake? When confronted by sanctioned evil and systematic injustice, how should a citizen live? Child’s lifetime of bravery, conviction, humility, and determination provides a wealth of spirited guidance for political engagement today.

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