Sisters and Rebels

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall with Nancy MacLean

Community & Scholars Speaker Series

The Regulator welcomes Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, author of Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America, for a reading and book signing. Dowd Hall will be joined in conversation by Duke professor Nancy MacLean (Democracy in Chains) as part of The Regulator’s Community & Scholars series.

Award-winning historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall follows the divergent paths of the Lumpkin sisters — three sisters from the South who wrestle with orthodoxies of race, sexuality, and privilege. Descendants of a prominent slaveholding family, Elizabeth, Grace, and Katharine Lumpkin grew up in a culture of white supremacy. One sister remained a lifelong believer, while the other two sought their fortunes in the North and reinvented themselves as radical thinkers whose literary works and organizing efforts brought the nation’s attention to issues of region, race, and labor. Grounded in decades of research, the family’s private papers, and interviews with Katharine and Grace, Sisters and Rebels unfolds an epic narrative of American history through the lives and works of three Southern women.

Free and open to the public. The Community & Scholars Speaker Series is co-sponsored by the Regulator Bookshop and the Forum for Scholars and Publics.