Lydia Child, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, Boston: Allen and Ticknor, 1833.
Initially a children's author and writer of books for women (including her enormously popular The Frugal Housewife in 1829), Child wrote this, the first exhaustive, systematic analysis of modern slavery, as an antislavery polemic following several years of thought and study on that 'peculiar institution.' Her vision of abolition included immediate emancipation and full social integration, including interracial education and marriage, and the book was consequently both influential and inflammatory. While persuading some to her point of view and serving as an historical basis on which other abolitionist writers would build their own arguments, the book caused many, especially in her home town of Boston, to reject both her radical views and her broader literary offerings.
Gift: Horatio Bridge.