Radical Relationships
The Civil War–Era Correspondence of Mathilde Franziska Anneke
Title Details
Pages: 276
Illustrations: 10 b&w images
Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in
Formats
Hardcover
Pub Date: 09/01/2021
ISBN: 9-780-8203-6022-5
List Price: $120.95
Web PDF
Pub Date: 09/01/2021
ISBN: 9-780-8203-6024-9
List Price: $34.95
Paperback
Pub Date: 09/01/2021
ISBN: 9-780-8203-6023-2
List Price: $34.95
Web PDF
Pub Date: 09/01/2021
ISBN: 9-780-8203-6822-1
List Price: $34.95
Related Subjects
HISTORY / United States / 19th Century
POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Ideologies / Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
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Radical Relationships
The Civil War–Era Correspondence of Mathilde Franziska Anneke
The first translations of Mathilde Franziska Anneke’s private correspondence
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- Description
- Reviews
This collection of intimate letters reveals the remarkable radicalism—personal and political—of Mathilde Franziska Anneke. Anneke first became a well-known feminist and democrat in Prussia, earning notoriety for divorcing her first husband and fighting in the German Revolutions of 1848–1849. After moving to the United States, she became a noted proponent of woman suffrage, working with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Like many other refugees of the German revolutions, Anneke was deeply involved in the Civil War.
Radical Relationships focuses on the years 1859–1865, which encompassed not only the war but also Anneke’s intense romantic friendship with Yankee abolitionist Mary Booth. Over the course of seven years, Anneke supported Mary through her husband’s trial for rape. When Sherman Booth was later imprisoned for his abolitionist activity, Anneke conspired to spring him from jail. The two women then moved with three of their children to Zürich, Switzerland, where they collaborated on antislavery fiction and mixed with leading European radicals such as Ferdinand Lassalle. From Europe, they followed the fate of German-born soldiers in the Union army, including Anneke’s husband, Fritz, and his court martial. Throughout her career, Anneke’s intimate relationships informed her politics and sustained her activism. Her correspondence with Fritz and Mary Booth provides fresh perspectives on the transnational dimensions of the Civil War and gender and sexuality.
—Diane Miller Sommerville, author of Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War-Era South
Mathilde Franziska Anneke’s extraordinary life as a revolutionary, feminist, abolitionist, and journalist in the mid-nineteenth century has long deserved wider recognition. Radical Relationships immerses readers in Anneke’s exciting world and helps readers grasp, better than any book before, the passions that motivated this extraordinary woman.
—Tyler Anbinder, author of City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York
—Mischa Honeck, author of We Are the Revolutionists
—Anke Ortlepp, author of Germans and African Americans: Two Centuries of Exchange
—Bonnie Carr O'Neill, American Literary History