Abolition and Fall of American Slavery: Antislavery Movements in the United States

This seminar examines the history of antislavery movements and struggles from the end of the seventeenth century to the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery in 1865. With intensive reading in an array of primary sources, including speeches, manifestos, private letters, poetry, and more, supplemented with pertinent secondary readings, it inquires into how antislavery fitfully moved from the margins of American politics and culture to become, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a mass political movement that won national political power and sparked the Civil War.