{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.025120772946859903, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0014492753623188406, 'mean_word_length': 5.7901639344262295, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Romantic Reformers and the Antislavery Struggle in the Civil War Era by Ethan J. Kytle (review)

The threat that such family crises could pose to a professional and political career built on exemplary black achievement is clear from Greenspan’s revealing account of the intramural surveillance to which a rival abolitionist faction subjected Brown. But here and elsewhere, the style of this rigorous, yet always highly readable, biography seems to conflict with its substance. For instance, glossing the “strange[ness]” of Brown’s public exchange with William Seward, New York’s antislavery ex-governor, Greenspan asks, “Why was a dedicated employee of the American Anti-Slavery Society—which uncompromisingly opposed all organized political activity as a debased and ineffective means of ending slavery—lobbying a prominent politician for the restoration of black suffrage in New York?” (138). Between the two em dashes is compressed the highly influential (and equally controversial) philosophy behind William Lloyd Garrison’s strand of abolitionism. Rather than an overview of the central controversies within abolitionism— moral suasion versus political tactics, gradualism versus immediatism, nonviolent resistance versus direct action, and the concurrent debates over the place of women and African Americans in movement leadership—the reader is often introduced to such core issues through incidental, even cryptic asides. Greenspan’s account will give scholars a new appreciation for the deftness with which Brown negotiated an Anglo-American abolitionist movement too often riven by factionalism, but a more thorough immersion in the principles of the competing groups would provide the general reader with a richer sense of the stakes of the disputes dividing the diverse, contentious transatlantic reform community in which Brown thrived. All, however, should come away from this indispensable volume with a new understanding of William Wells Brown’s tremendous importance as author, media artist, activist, and cultural entrepreneur. Jeannine Marie DeLombard