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The Agitators by Dorothy Wickenden
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The Agitators

Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights

$25.19

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Length 13 hours 8 minutes
Language English
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An LA Times Best Book of the Year, Christopher Award Winner, and Chautauqua Prize Finalist!

“Engrossing... examines the major events of the mid 19th century through the lives of three key figures in the abolitionist and women’s rights movements.” —Smithsonian

From the executive editor of The New Yorker, a riveting, provocative, and revelatory history told through the story of three women—Harriet Tubman, Frances Seward, and Martha Wright—in the years before, during and after the Civil War.


In the 1850s, Harriet Tubman, strategically brilliant and uncannily prescient, rescued some seventy enslaved people from Maryland’s Eastern Shore and shepherded them north along the underground railroad. One of her regular stops was Auburn, New York, where she entrusted passengers to Martha Coffin Wright, a Quaker mother of seven, and Frances A. Seward, the wife of William H. Seward, who served over the years as governor, senator, and secretary of state under Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War, Tubman worked for the Union Army in South Carolina as a nurse and spy, and took part in a spectacular river raid in which she helped to liberate 750 slaves from several rice plantations.

Wright, a “dangerous woman” in the eyes of her neighbors, worked side by side with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to organize women’s rights and anti-slavery conventions across New York State, braving hecklers and mobs when she spoke. Frances Seward, the most conventional of the three friends, hid her radicalism in public, while privately acting as a political adviser to her husband, pressing him to persuade President Lincoln to move immediately on emancipation.

The Agitators opens in the 1820s, when Tubman is enslaved and Wright and Seward are young homemakers bound by law and tradition, and ends after the war. Many of the most prominent figures of the era—Lincoln, William H. Seward, Frederick Douglass, Daniel Webster, Charles Sumner, John Brown, William Lloyd Garrison—are seen through the discerning eyes of the protagonists. So are the most explosive political debates: about the civil rights of African Americans and women, about the enlistment of Black troops, and about opposing interpretations of the Constitution.

Through richly detailed letters from the time and exhaustive research, Wickenden traces the second American revolution these women fought to bring about, the toll it took on their families, and its lasting effects on the country. Riveting and profoundly relevant to our own time, The Agitators brings a vibrant, original voice to this transformative period in our history.

Dorothy Wickenden is the author of Nothing Daunted and The Agitators and has been the executive editor of The New Yorker since January 1996. She also writes for the magazine and is the moderator of its weekly podcast The Political Scene. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, Wickenden was national affairs editor at Newsweek from 1993-1995, and before that was the longtime executive editor at The New Republic. She lives with her husband in Westchester, New York.

Gabra Zackman knows romance. Her clever and “thrilling romantic caper” (Library Journal) Bod Squad series was inspired by the more than one hundred romance and women’s fiction titles she has narrated for audio. She divides her time between her native New York City and Denver, Colorado.

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Reviews

"Narrators Heather Alicia Simms, Anne Twomey, and Gabra Zackman harmonize to memorable effect in Dorothy Wickenden's remarkable examination of three friends who led twin battles for abolition and women's rights in nineteenth-century America. Simms gives a witty and rousing rendition of Harriet Tubman, freedom fighter extraordinaire; Twomey is gentle and steely as Francis Seward, the publicly conventional and privately radical wife of Secretary of State William H. Seward; and Gabra Zackman is energized and clear as Martha Wright, uncompromising Quaker mother of seven. Their surprising and inspiring lives are woven together with those of such luminaries as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln, for between them, they knew everyone. Informative, entertaining, unnerving, and stirring—listen and then share this book with all your friends." Expand reviews
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