American radicals : how nineteenth-century protest shaped the nation
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references (pages [333]-358) and index.

"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 offersimportant lessons for our own time.--Adapted from jacket.