Sean Wilentz: The Politics of Early American Abolitionism

The Humanities Council invites the campus community to join us for a new series of public lectures given by the Council’s Old Dominion Research Professors for 2018-19.

Sean Wilentz (George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History and Old Dominion Research Professor 2018-19) will deliver the final lecture in the series entitled “The Politics of Early American Abolitionism.”

Organized antislavery politics originated in America in the aftermath of the American Revolution. Over the ensuing fifty years, American abolitionists pioneered the techniques as well as the ideas that would inform the later activities of William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln. This largely untold history helps us appreciate how the struggle over slavery began with the nation itself, and how that struggle was entwined with the early expansion of American democracy.