ON A COLD BUT PLEASANT DAY in December 1849, Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Carové returned to the University of Heidelberg with a momentous request. The author of an all-German proclamation demanding the worldwide abolition of slavery, Carové urged the theological faculty to confer an honorary doctorate of divinity on an American minister whom he had come to appreciate earlier that year at the World Peace Congress in Paris. James W.C. Pennington, the man Carové proposed for the honorary doctorate, was no ordinary candidate. A cherished member of the international peace and abolitionist movements, Pennington was also a Presbyterian pastor and, more...

WHEN FRENCH WORKERS CROWDED the streets of Paris in February 1848 to demonstrate against rising food prices, few realized that this was merely the overture to a greater revolutionary concert. The flames of popular unrest spread quickly across the Continent, radically altering the political landscape of post-Napoleonic Europe. The first crowned head to tumble was France’s Louis Philippe, whose abdication cleared the way for the Second French Republic. Panic soon struck the ruling elites in Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. Klemens von Metternich, the old Austrian chancellor who had long denied national independence to different peoples inside and outside the empire...

UNTIL THE WAR, most antislavery northerners never had any firsthand encounters with the slaveholding South. Their critiques of the “peculiar institution” more often stemmed from abstract beliefs than from concrete experience. Frederick Law Olmsted, for one, was too much of an empiricist to rely on book learning alone. Born and raised as the son of a Connecticut merchant, Olmsted was intimately familiar with the reform movements of his day and cultivated close ties to New England’s intellectual elite. Although sympathetic to many causes, including emancipation, Olmsted was no zealot. Discussions with William Lloyd Garrison and his lifelong friend Charles Loring...

WHAT HAPPENED IN NORTHERN VIRGINIA on October 18, 1859, was on the surface nothing more than a minor skirmish. Yet the news it generated led to a political earthquake. John Brown, veteran of the clashes between pro-and antislavery forces in Kansas, and eighteen of his followers — thirteen whites and five blacks — had seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, from whence they hoped to launch an insurrection among the slaves of Virginia. But the intervention of U.S. marines under the command of Robert E. Lee put an end to Brown’s plans. Most of his party were either killed or captured....

THE COUPLE THAT TOOK UP RESIDENCE in the Milwaukee home of Wisconsin abolitionist Sherman M. Booth in December 1858 were no ordinary people. Fritz and Mathilde Franziska Anneke had come a long way, and their journey from the battlefields of revolutionary Baden to the distant melting pots of the New World supplied them with a multitude of tales and stories. Mary Booth, Sherman’s young wife and a vivid storyteller herself, seemed particularly gripped by the vignettes that her new female housemate had to share. One day her tenant appeared as a modern-day “Joan of Arc,” overflowing with memories of the...

THE FUNERAL SERVICE PROCEEDED as he had wished. In the early afternoon of November 15, 1880, a column of Turners from Boston and surrounding towns flocked to his house on Cedar Street. They were dressed in mourning, for the man to whom they had come to pay homage was no more. Karl Heinzen, editor of thePionierand one of the most adamant proponents of German-bred radical democracy on American soil, had died three days ago of the late effects of a stroke he had suffered the previous year. He was seventy-one years old. By October, Heinzen had been certain...

IMAGINE A THANKSGIVING DAY DINNER where all are invited and nobody is left out. In a solemnly lit room, ethnic Americans from all over the world are seated at a round table, waiting for Uncle Sam to carve the turkey and put it on the plates of his hungry guests. German, Native American, French, Arab, British, African, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, and Irish revelers — men, women, and children — are united in happy anticipation, having buried the animosities of the past. On the wall behind Uncle Sam hangs a large picture of Castle Garden, the first official U.S. immigrant center, with a...