Lecture: Dreams of Freedom
Description
Dreams of Freedom
Date: Wednesday, March 19, 2025
In-Person Event
$10/person | HRMM Members $5/person
Program Topic:
Not unlike today, during the decade leading up to the Civil War, Americans feared their nation was coming apart. Immigration through the Erie Canal corridor was shaking the foundations of American culture, spawning community experiments, ethnic and religious bigotry and a rapidly expanding economy that would open the west and make New York the most powerful city in the nation. Amidst this chaos, activists like Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Gerrit Smith challenged the nation to live up to its principles and put an end to slavery. The backlash was immediate and violent. Congress and the Supreme Court attempted to move the deeply divided nation forward through compromise, failed and led America into the Civil War. In “Dreams of Freedom,” Irish immigrant Aileen O’Malley navigates this landscape in search of her father and kidnapped siblings. When she witnesses slaves taking their own lives to avoid capture and the painful dislocation of the Haudenosaunee people, she joins the Underground Railroad and ultimately the Union Army in an attempt to divert her new nation, America, from the cruelty that haunted her native Ireland for centuries.
Presenter:
Marilyn Higgins has spent her life loving and working in the cities, small towns and places of extraordinary natural beauty that comprise upstate New York. Her passion for the area’s rich history and belief in its profound impact on America’s national identity motivated her to write “Dreams of Freedom.” As the chief economic development officer for National Grid (Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation) and later Syracuse University, she was told intriguing stories and saw the mysterious artifacts of upstate New York’s Erie Canal communities. Her fascination with these places, where new religions were born and waves of immigrants, abolitionism, women’s rights and Haudenosaunee culture entwined in the 19th century continues. A twenty-year volunteer with the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor, she is currently working with the National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum and her home community of Canastota, New York to promote the “Abolitionist Freedom Walk,” a public reenactment of the storied 1835 canal journey and march of 104 abolitionists up a steep nine-mile embankment to the Hamlet of Peterboro to form the New York Anti-Slavery Society. Imagining the life of a young Irish woman in search of her lost family along the Erie Canal at a time when the area was a hotbed of dissent and the critical last-leg of escape on the underground railroad, energized her in the writing of this novel.
This program is being presented in-person at the Hudson River Maritime Museum's Wooden Boat School. The Wooden Boat School is located at 86 Rondout Landing, Kingston, NY 12401.
Members can receive their registration discount by logging in. Please note that you must be a current member the date of the event to receive your discount.