Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics Book

Free Hearts and Free Homes is an interesting, engaging work about a topic that is so often overshadowed in the average history classroom concerning the antebellum period. Pierson [full disclosure: he was my professor] manages to deftly weave together gender and antislavery politics in a fashion that makes it quite clear that they were inextricably linked, a fact that many contemporaries attempted to outright ignore in that period, which consequently has shaped our understanding of that particular period until the emergence of the New Social History movement. Pierson's tales of Senator Thomas H. Benton's spitfire daughter Jessie Benton Fremont and her dashing husband the presidential candidate John C. Fremont were particularly memorable and riveting.