Dr. Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, professor of English and American studies at Penn State-Altoona, will speak on role of women in the antislavery movement leading up to the U.S. Civil War on Wednesday, February 24 in Frostburg and on Thursday, February 25 in Cumberland.

Both presentations of her lecture, “Unsung Heroes and Everyday Reform: Women and Radical Abolitionism in Thoreau’s Concord,” are open to the public and, with support from the Maryland Humanities Council, are free of charge.

The sessions -- 7 PM on Wednesday, February 24 at Frostburg State University and 11 AM on Thursday, February 25 at Allegany College of Maryland -- are scheduled with assistance from the FSU history department and the ACM student government in observance of Black and Women’s History Months.

For her talk Petrulionis draws on her research of the antebellum period in Concord, Mass., a center of social progressivism and antislavery activism that is best known in U.S. history for the first battle of the American Revolution.

A focus on 1850s-Concord, which claimed two residents influential in forming American thought -- Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson -- provides Petrulionis a microcosm in which to view an abolitionist movement that crossed lines of race, class, and gender.

What she found is that women, including in the Thoreau and Emerson households, were the driving force of the abolition movement in Concord, a community that became legendary in the larger drive to end a grave injustice in a nation whose constitution pledged freedom and equality for all.

Petrulionis revealed her findings in “To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau’s Concord.”  The 264-page book was published by Cornell University Press in November 2006.

A Penn State-Altoona faculty member since 1996, Petrulionis also coordinates the Letters, Arts and Science Degree Program there.  She holds a doctorate in English from Georgia State University.

For more information on her ACM and FSU lectures contact ACM faculty members Cherie Snyder or Stephen Gibson at (301) 784-5556 or 5208, respectively, or FSU faculty member Greg Wood at (301) 687- 4766.