Writing with Giants: Making the Human Larger than Life

Civil War biographer Carol Bundy talks with John Stauffer, a leading historian of the antislavery movement and the Civil War, about his upcoming biography of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, whose moral stand on slavery led to his being beaten on the Senate floor. Writing about Charles Sumner, a complicated man whose life didn’t neatly conform to expectations both in the public and the private sphere, raises all sorts of questions about the uses of biography and the biographical approach to unveil the moral dimension of social change. Stauffer is the author of over a dozen books including Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.

New England Biography Seminar series information