God has created these powers, and you can and do use them

American Quakers began to question slavery as early as the late seventeenth century and worked with British reformers in the successful campaign that ended the slave trade.

Exchanging ideas and building networks proved crucial to shared causes like abolition and women’s rights.

These men (and the occasional woman) won converts by pushing west with the expanding United States over the Alleghenies and into the Ohio River Valley, bringing religion to new settlers hungry to have their spiritual needs attended.

and evangelicalism promised equal measures of excitement and order

With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles. You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together;

Satisfied that if any circumstances have given peculiar value to my services, they were temporary, I have the consolation to believe that, while choice and prudence invite me to quit the political scene, patriotism does not forbid it.

I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those out of whom a choice is to be made.

These stories present living as a man as something that a woman must do out of financial or social necessity

“produced by people looking from the outside in—law enforcement officers, judges, newspaper reporters.”

“to have a history written where then other historians could start looking up the footnotes and seeing where to even go to find material.”

European expansion into the Americas introduced both settlers and European authorities to a new situation—an abundance of land and a scarcity of labor

“I can’t think there is any intrinsic value in one color more than another, nor that white is better than black, only we think it so because we are so.”3 For Phillips, the profitability of slavery was the only justification he needed.

collective memory can bear only so much.

“I will never be able to forget the scene, the utter horror of it. The patients in the contagious wards, especially in the scarlet fever ward, went wild at things they saw from their windows and went screaming and beating at the doors until it took fifty nurses and doctors to quiet them. They were all locked up. Along the beach the boats were carrying in the living and dying and towing in the dead.”