Although they are rarely considered in relation to each other, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852) and Frederick Douglass’ “The Heroic Slave” (1853) were released about six months apart by publishers located on the same block in downtown Boston. Beyond this, both works were richly interwoven into the fabric of American social, economic, political, literary and cultural life. This exhibition, which began in a Spring 2015 Advanced Topic English Seminar, uses rare books, first editions, and periodicals from the Burns Library’s Boston Collection to explore several of these contexts.

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Image caption: ​Frederick Douglass, "Fighting the Mob in Indiana," in Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Boston: De Wolfe and Fish, 1895