Joanne B. Freeman, "The Field of Blood"

Joanne B. Freeman discusses her book, "The Field of Blood", at Politics and Prose on 9/20/18.

As the national debate over slavery grew more impassioned in the 1840s and 1850s, local brush-fires throughout the nation anticipated the Civil War to come. The halls of Congress, too, saw their share of physical violence, and Freeman, a Yale history professor and cohost of the podcast BackStory, draws on a wide range of sources to document scores of incidents ranging from shouting to shoving matches, fistfights, drawn knives, and even death threats among elected representatives. Her revelatory book tracks a seldom-acknowledged history of incivility in American politics, revises views of familiar figures such as John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, and shows how the era’s reporting of these sensational events led to a new, splashier journalism.

Joanne B. Freeman, a professor of history and American studies at Yale University, is a leading authority on early national politics and political culture. Author of the award-winning Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic and editor of The Essential Hamilton and Alexander Hamilton: Writings, she is a cohost of the popular history podcast BackStory.

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Produced by Tom Warren