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Author Talk with Daniel Bullen

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Join us for a lecture with Daniel Bullen on his new book on a different look at Shays’s Rebellion.

DANIEL BULLEN earned a PhD in American literature from New York University. He is the author of The Dangers of Passion: The Transcendental Friendship of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller and The Love Lives of the Artists: Five Stories of Creative Intimacy. He lives in western Massachusetts.

Daniel Shays’s Honorable Rebellion: An American Story by Daniel Bullen tells the history of the crisis from the protesters’ perspective. Through five months of nonviolent protests, the farmers kept courts throughout Massachusetts from hearing foreclosures, facing down threats from the government, which escalated to the point that Governor James Bowdoin ultimately sent an army to arrest them. Even so, the people won reforms in an electoral landslide.

Thomas Jefferson called these protests an honorable rebellion, and hoped that Americans would never let twenty years pass without such a campaign, to rein in powerful interests. This riveting and meticulously researched narrative shows that Shays and his fellow protesters were hardly a dangerous rabble, but rather a proud people who banded together peaceably, risking their lives for justice in a quintessentially American story.