The Boston Athenæum welcomes DAVID GULLETTE, ANNETTE MILLER, VINCENT SIDERS AND CHERYL SINGLETON for a unique historical experience. Compiled by Gullette and directed by BOB SCANLAN, Boston Abolitionists gives voice to the wide range of anti-slavery attitudes in Massachusetts during the decades leading up to the Civil War. Black and white, female and male, well-known and obscure, these important writers and orators, including Lydia Maria Child, Paul Cuffee, Frederick Douglass, and Angelina Grimké Weld, among others, transformed fringe ideas—rejected by many in Boston as dangerous and “fanatical”—into a mainstream movement for emancipation.
This event is ticketed.
Certain books were “banned in Boston” at least as far back as 1651, when one William Pynchon wrote a book criticizing Puritanism.