I'm Christopher Leiden for OpenSource, taking notice with Lydia Molland that when present

company in American public life comes up short, the ancestors of American democracy and spirit

are lurking out there in abundance and power to reset our judgment of who we are and what

is possible for a society for each of us.

Lydia Molland is our sometime radio colleague now a philosophy professor at Colby College

in Maine. For her, the shock of recognition came at the chance side of a 19th century

letter from a battling idealist Lydia Mariah Child whom she had never heard of. It reminds

me of the Pulitzer Prize biographer Stacey Schiff, dealing much the same rapture at the

same moment in 2016, rediscovering the sturdy giant of the American Revolution Samuel Adams.

Lydia Molland's big book became a story not just of a central figure in the abolition

of slavery, but of her own passion as a contemporary scholar finding a model of moral courage

for our own times. We spoke together at the Harvard bookstore in Cambridge on the publication

of her book Lydia Mariah Child a Radical American Life.

Thank you Hillary. Tickled to be here. This book is on fire and so is the author in life here.

There's three books here in a certain way. There's the author Lydia. It's a biography with

a purpose in a sense and then there is the subject Lydia, incredibly interesting type of

the vocational world changer. But then the third thing is simply the history of Boston

that I didn't know. Boston in the 1830s. Boston in the abolitionist theorist, Frenzy.

But maybe Lydia would you to start with reading the touches on your own motivation. This

book sees you had to be written. Thank you. So Lydia Mariah Child was born in 1802 in

Medford, Massachusetts. Her father was a baker who did not value education, especially

for girls. But she had an older brother who loved books and who passed his books on to

...