Bleeding Kansas TALK Series

Book Titles

The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton
by Jane Smiley
Set mostly in the Kansas Territory shortly before the Civil War, narrator Lydia "Lidie" Harkness marries Thomas Newton, a soft-spoken abolitionist committed to helping the "free-staters" protect Kansas against those who would make it a slave state. Missourians crossing the border wreak havoc on hotbeds of abolitionist activity, and Thomas is soon one of many casualties. Lidie, who'd become an even more ardent free-stater than her husband, sets off on an eastward journey seeking revenge and finding instead an unexpected empowerment. Her adventures while disguised as a boy, reporting for a proslavery newspaper, and helping a woman escape a plantation are recounted.

The Englishman in Kansas
by T. H. Gladstone
Just days before the 1856 burning of Lawrence by pro-slavery people, Englishman T. H. Gladstone arrived in Kansas for an "on the scene" report. He paints vivid pictures of "border ruffians," frontier life, and the violence of slavery. Openly a partisan of abolition, Gladstone gives the background to the "bleeding Kansas" controversy and the fight to control the elections to elect the representatives that will decide if Kansas will be free or a slave state.

John Brown: The Legend Revisited
by Merrill D. Peterson
A fervent abolitionist, Brown advocated arming fugitive slaves to fight for their freedom. In 1855, answering the call of his five sons to join them in the struggle for freedom in the new territories, John Brown became a hero of "Bleeding Kansas." Labeled a madman for his failed military attempt at Harpers Ferry in 1859, and repudiated by prominent antislavery leaders, Brown was sentenced to hang for treason. Peterson's book gives us Brown in his own day, but he also shows how the abolitionist warrior's image, celebrated in art, literature, and journalism, has shed some of the infamy conferred by "Bleeding Kansas" to become a symbol of American idealism and fervor to activists along the political spectrum.

Uncle Tom's Cabin
by Harriet Beecher Stowe
A novel of the pre-Civil War South, Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and for its presentation of Tom, "a man of humanity," as the first black hero in American fiction. Prompted by the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act, Stowe first published the story serially in an abolitionist paper. When it was published as a book by a Boston publisher, 10,000 copies sold in one week. It remains a shocking, controversial, and powerful work – exposing the attitudes of white nineteenth-century society toward "the peculiar institution" and documenting, in heartrending detail, the tragic breakup of black Kentucky families.