Who were the abolitionists? Opinions vary. Today most people hail them as courageous fighters for justice and champions of human rights. But there are also those who have painted the abolitionists in less flattering colors, picturing them as fanatics whose agitation tore apart communities and plunged an entire nation into a bloody civil war. This seminar will move beyond such binaries and appreciate the abolitionist movement as a “decentralized enterprise, subject to local variation and internal factionalism” (George M. Fredrickson). It will trace various strands of abolitionist thought and practice across lines of class, race, gender, and nationality from the Age of Revolutions to the US Civil War. In addition, it will explore the relationship of the struggle against slavery with other major reform movements in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world, including temperance, socialism, nationalism, and women’s rights. Designed specifically for students who are in the early phase of their academic training (BA or Lehramt), this seminar will introduce participants to historical research methods and acquaint them with analytical tools that historians use to investigate the past.
This class will be taught in person. We will form two groups of no more than 15 students that will rotate in and out of the seminar room on a weekly basis. Online learning units will be made available to those working from home. Participants are required to comply with all of the university’s protective measures against the Covid-19 pandemic (“Vaccinated, Tested, Convalescent”). Please note, however, that we might have to return to remote teaching if the public health situation deteriorates.