Synopses & Reviews
One of the most celebrated women of her time, a spellbinding speaker dubbed the Queen of the Lyceum and America's Joan of Arc, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson was a charismatic orator, writer, and actress, who rose to fame during the Civil War and remained in the public eye for the next three decades.
J. Matthew Gallman offers the first full-length biography of Dickinson to appear in over half a century. Gallman describes how Dickinson's passionate patriotism and fiery style, coupled with her unabashed abolitionism and biting critiques of antiwar Democrats--known as Copperheads--struck a nerve with her audiences. In barely two years, she rose from an unknown young Philadelphia radical, to a successful New England stump speaker, to a true national celebrity. At the height of her fame, Dickinson counted many of the nation's leading reformers, authors, politicians, and actors among her friends. Among the dozens of famous figures who populate the narrative are Susan B. Anthony, Whitelaw Reid, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Gallman shows how Dickinson's life illuminates the possibilities and barriers faced by nineteenth-century women, revealing how their behavior could at once be seen as worthy, highly valued, shocking, and deviant.
Review
"Dickinson's life provides American history with powerful evidence of the roles women played outside of the suffrage movement, and Gallman's splendid work fits well into the expanding literature on women politicos and women in partisan politics.... In a country that prides itself on individualism
and a canon that seeks to highlight the lives of those who pursue it, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson deserves a place of honor."--Janet L. Coryell, H-Net Reviews
"It is a gripping story, well told and ferociously well documented."--Times Literary Supplement
"The definitive biography.... Chronicles the rise and fall of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, one of the most celebrated women of the mid-19th century. In writing the first full-length biography of Dickinson in more than 50 years, Gallman, through meticulous research and a fluid writing style, resurrects
the story of this revolutionary woman once lost to history."--Library Journal
"I couldn't put this book down! Matthew Gallman has brought us the fascinating story of Anna Dickinson, the bold, young woman who embodied American women's dramatic entry into party politics in the Civil War years. Private drama alongside of public achievement put Dickinson back where she once
was--at the center of that era's historic upheavals." --Ellen Carol DuBois, University of California, Los Angeles
"At last the neglected Anna Dickinson has found her biographer. Matthew Gallman's America's Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson brings to life this extraordinary nineteenth century American woman. With meticulous research and careful investigation Gallman has separated the strands of
Dickinson's many activities as no one has before, and he has placed them in the context of her times and her own powerful convictions."--Jean H. Baker, author of Sisters: The Lives of America's Suffragists
"Gallman's nuanced portrait of the incomparable Dickinson--the first rigorous scholarly account of her life--provides a wealth of insights into the social construction of gender, citizenship, race, madness, and celebrity, and thus takes us to the very heart of America's Victorian era. Gallman makes
a powerful argument that Dickinson's fame served as a beacon to other women who wanted to enter public life." --Elizabeth R. Varon, Temple University
"Matt Gallman has produced a nuanced and imaginatively researched biography of Dickinson and her times. America's Joan of Arc is a poignanRt examination of what it meant to be a woman at the intersections of patriotism and politics, gender dynamics and popular culture, celebrity and
entrepreneurialism, and entertainment and self-expression in Victorian America." --James Marten, author of The Children's Civil War
"Illuminat[es] the life and times of an extraordinary 19th-century woman."--Publishers Weekly
Review
"A welcome addition to the literature on nineteenth-century women who successfully challenged gender conventions to carve out unconventional but highly regarded places for themselves in American public life."--Sylvia D. Hoffert The Journal of American History
"Gallman has made an outstanding contribution to our picture of nineteenth-century gender politics and culture and the pivotal place of Anna Dickinson in that world."--Nina Silber, Civil War History
"America's Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson does full justice to one of the most remarkable figures in American history, Anna Dickinson, an orator who, as a very young woman, spoke in behalf of the Republican Part during the Civil War and dazzled her contemporaries."--Glenna Matthews, The Journal of Southern History
"Gallman's elegantly written and deeply researched biography reveals the complicated life of an important historical figure...Dickinson's story, varied, tragic, and compellingly narrated, contains much that will be fascinating to historians of the mid-nineteenth century." --American Historical Review
Review
"A welcome addition to the literature on nineteenth-century women who successfully challenged gender conventions to carve out unconventional but highly regarded places for themselves in American public life."--Sylvia D. Hoffert The Journal of American History
"Gallman has made an outstanding contribution to our picture of nineteenth-century gender politics and culture and the pivotal place of Anna Dickinson in that world."--Nina Silber, Civil War History
"America's Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson does full justice to one of the most remarkable figures in American history, Anna Dickinson, an orator who, as a very young woman, spoke in behalf of the Republican Part during the Civil War and dazzled her contemporaries."--Glenna Matthews, The Journal of Southern History
About the Author
J. Matthew Gallman is Professor of History at the University of Florida. An authority on the American Civil War, he is the author of
Receiving Erin's Children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish Famine Migration, 1845-1855; The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front; and
Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia During the Civil War.