Author Talk: Lisa Materson & Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor

Avid Reader is delighted to host authors Lisa Materson and Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor for an evening in conversation with Corrie Deckert on February 28th at 6:00 PM.

About the Authors

Lisa G. Materson is a professor of modern US women’s political history at the University of California at Davis. She documents the lives of women who challenged institutional power and its abuse, often at great cost to themselves, in order to assert the promises of US democracy. She is the author of Radical Solidarity: Ruth Reynolds, Political Allyship, and the Battle for Puerto Rico’s Independence (UNC Press, 2024) and For Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877-1932 (UNC Press, 2009).

Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor is a specialist in early American and women’s history. In addition to her appointment in the History Department at at the University of California at Davis, she is Associate Dean for Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Scholars. She is the author of America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024) and The Ties that Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), and a co-author of Global Americans (Cengage Publishing, 2017).

Together, Professors Hartigan-O’Connor and Materson are editors of The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History (Oxford, 2018).

About the Books

America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values by Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor

As the first book-length study of auctions in early America, America Under the Hammer follows this ubiquitous but largely overlooked institution to reveal how, across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, price became an accepted expression of value. From the earliest days of colonial conquest, auctions put Native land and human beings up for bidding alongside material goods, normalizing new economic practices that turned social relations into economic calculations and eventually became recognizable as nineteenth-century American capitalism.

Starting in the eighteenth century, neighbors collectively turned speculative value into economic “facts” in the form of concrete prices for specific items, thereby establishing ideas about fair exchange in their communities. This consensus soon fractured: during the Revolutionary War, state governments auctioned loyalist property, weaponizing local group participation in pricing and distribution to punish political enemies. By the early nineteenth century, suspicion that auction outcomes were determined by manipulative auctioneers prompted politicians and satirists to police the boundaries of what counted as economic exchange and for whose benefit the economy operated. Women at auctions―as commodities, bidders, or beneficiaries―became a focal point for gendering economic value itself. By the 1830s, as abolitionists attacked the public sale of enslaved men, women, and children, auctions had enshrined a set of economic ideas―that any entity could be coded as property and priced through competition―that have become commonsense understandings all too seldom challenged.

In contrast to histories focused on banks, currencies, or plantations, America Under the Hammer highlights an institution that integrated market, community, and household in ways that put gender, race, and social bonds at the center of ideas about economic worth. Women and men, enslaved and free, are active participants in this story rather than bystanders, and their labor, judgments, and bodies define the resulting contours of the American economy.

Radical Solidarity: Ruth Reynolds, Political Allyship, and the Battle for Puerto Rico’s Independence by Lisa G. Materson

In 1950, US pacifist Ruth Reynolds was arrested at her San Juan, Puerto Rico home amid an island-wide uprising and eventually convicted for conspiring to overthrow the government there. In her new book, Radical Solidarity, University of California at Davis professor Lisa G. Materson unravels this puzzle of the pacifist who supported a revolutionary resistance movement, to introduce the concept of “radical solidarity.” In our fraught times, this unlikely story forces a consideration of the boundaries of allyship and prompts justice-oriented individuals to think not only about the future of Puerto Rico for Puerto Ricans but also what it means to believe in US democracy and to take personal responsibility for US government injustices.

Materson chronicles key moments in Reynolds’s transformation from an observer to a leader in the Puerto Rican independence movement. At each stage of her activist career—as a student of Gandhian nonviolence in the Midwest, a civil rights protester in New York, and a political prisoner in Puerto Rico—Reynolds refined her vision of solidarity that bridged strategic differences. Along the way, readers meet fascinating anti-colonial voices who, despite their steadfast and bold activism, have been erased from US history books.

Radical Solidarity works both as a stirring work of biography and a basis for questioning the dynamics of allyship and outsider participation in revolutionary movements. While shedding light on the tortured history of US involvement in Puerto Rico, Materson captures the complexities and possibilities of anti-colonial activists uniting to create a more just world.