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This paper uses data from an intensive study of Boston's antebellum black community to demonstrate how sustained social activism is embedded in the formal and informal institutions of the community. The social networks of cooperative institutions were primary factors in this community's ability to mobilize and sustain protest actions and to call attention to social injustice. This examination of antebellum black Boston indicates that the issue of slavery was crucial to social activism. This suggests that the presence of a salient issue which links the everyday lives of participants with a public issue may be an important factor in building a social movement based in a poor, relatively powerless community.

[First paragraph]Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833-1874. CHRISTOPHER SCHMIDT-NOWARA. Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. xv + 239 pp. (Cloth US$ 50.00, Paper US$ 22.95)Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies. FREDERICK COOPER, THOMAS C. HOLT & REBECCA J. SCOTT. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xiii + 198 pp. (Cloth US$ 34.95, Paper US$ 15.95)From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise andFall of Atlantic Slavery. SEYMOUR DRESCHER. New York: New York University Press, 1999. xxv + 454 pp. (Cloth US$ 45.00)Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor. STANLEY L. ENGERMAN (ed.). Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. vi + 350 pp. (Cloth US$ 55.00)These four books explore antislavery movements in the Atlantic world, and consider some of the consequences of abolition in postemancipation societies. They are immensely rich studies which engage one of the liveliest areas of enquiry in modern historiography - the transition from slavery to freedom in New World societies - and which represent U.S. historical scholarship at its finest. Each falls into a different category of academic publication.

We analyze how communications networks and social institutions influenced the growth of the antislavery movement in the U.S. from 1790 to 1840. Communications networks fueled by print media transmitted news about the movement to the public and so helped mobilize a broad base of support. Among social institutions, churches were especially supportive because their emphasis on morality and community was conducive to antislavery activism. Our analysis focuses on the founding of antislavery societies, the formal organizations that underpinned this movement, and makes three contributions to our understanding of social movement organizations in general and antislavery societies in particular. First, we show that the impact of mass media was strong as far back as the early nineteenth century and that the growth of magazines spurred antislavery society formation. Second, we demonstrate that theology, specifically an orientation toward this world or heaven, determined whether religious resources were available to antislavery organizations. This-worldly religions supported abolition organizing, while other-worldly religions undermined it. Third, we resolve an important causal ambiguity in debates about antislavery by showing that the development of the media was the cause, not merely a consequence of or companion to growth of antislavery organizations.

This article refines our understanding of abolitionism as "the first modern social movement" through a microhistory of abolitionism in an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British town. Examining requisitions, which collected signatures calling on a mayor to convene public meetings to launch parliamentary petitions or other associational activities, the article shows how antislavery mobilization in Plymouth grew amongst a multiplying variety of religious, political, cultural, and economic institutions. Through a prosopography of those initiating antislavery petitions, an analysis of the other requisitions they supported, and qualitative evidence from leading abolitionists' personal papers, the article details the ways local leaders raised petitions for a national campaign. Civic and religious dynamism at this local level facilitated new forms of contentious mobilization on national and imperial issues. The article therefore directs causal attention to those socioeconomic changes that underpinned the associational cultures of abolitionism.

In his autobiography, Cheerful Yesterdays, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, looking back on the long crusade that ended with the abolition of Negro bondage in the United States, declared: "The anti-slavery movement was not strongest in the educated classes, but was primarily a people's movement, based on the simplest human instincts and far stronger … in the factories and shoe-shops than in the pulpits and colleges." Few people have challenged this statement, which Higginson made in 1898; probably because the scarcity of material on the subject has prevented a thorough examination of all its implications, and especially of the main argument that the laboring man was the real force behind the antislavery crusade.Yet there is sufficient evidence to throw serious doubt upon the accuracy of Higginson's statement, evidence which reveals that workers in shops and factories often exhibited an almost callous unconcern for the entire crusade.

THE STUDY OF POPULAR LITERATURE IN GERMANYCRUSADE FOR FREEDOM: WOMEN IN THE ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENT. By Alma Lutz