Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication Among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas

for radical ends—no less than the destruction of slavery—they could not live so vividly in the abolitionist imagination if they were not also washed in the oblivious waters of colonial amnesia. These observations notwithstanding, scholars interested in the nineteenth-century construction of the colonial past will find in Gradert’s engaging book an important revelation about how saturated abolitionist discourse (and the print market) was with the figure of the revolutionary Puritan and how that figure, crafted in the abolitionist imagination, animated the zealous fight to end slavery.