America of the Fifties: Letters of Fredrika Bremer: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

America of the Fifties: Letters of Fredrika Bremer, credited to Fredrika Bremer, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of America of the Fifties: Letters of Fredrika Bremer by Fredrika Bremer. (Translated by Mary Howitt.) Read in English by Ted Lienhart. When Fredrika Bremer arrived in New York from Sweden in October 1849, she was already famous throughout America for her novels and for her reformist efforts in Sweden. Thus there was no shortage of invitations, and she met with the leading lights of American culture, along with countless lesser-known people. Her main objective was to see the effect of democratic institutions on society. In her two years in America, she toured New England and met Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving; visited Shaker and Quaker communities in Mid-Atlantic states; conversed with Senators in Washington, DC, examined conditions of slaves in the South; and toured Scandinavian frontier communities in the Midwest. She also investigated America's prisons, and everywhere noted the legal status and social situations of women. Throughout her American travels, which ended in September 1851, she reported back all that she saw in letters to her sister. She then edited those letters and published them in a 1,300 page volume; "Homes of the New World: Impressions of America". In 1924 the American-Scandinavian Foundation published a selection of the letters in this edition. (Summary by Ted Lienhart)

Recording facts

• Recording title: America of the Fifties: Letters of Fredrika Bremer
• Author credits: Fredrika Bremer
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 18
• Listed recording duration: 8:32:54

Catalogue topics

• travel
• nonfiction
• memoir
• letters
• travel literature
• u.s. manners and customs 1850s
• u.s. description and travel 1850s
• u.s. social life and customs 1783-1865

Track guide

1. 00 - Introduction — 20:46
2. 01 - New York, October 4, 1849 — 30:28
3. 02 - Brooklyn, November 5, 1849 — 30:12
4. 03 - Boston, December 2 — 25:18
5. 04 - Boston, January 22 — 28:27
6. 05 - February 15 — 28:24
7. 06 - April 1 — 39:27
8. 07 - Macon, May 8 — 27:13
9. 08 - Charleston, June 10 — 31:52
10. 09 - June 27 — 28:48
11. 10 - July 18 — 31:11
12. 11 - Chicago, September 24 — 25:54
13. 12 - Blue Mound, October 8 — 28:04
14. 13 - (To the Rev. P.J. Boklin) Cincinnati, Nov 27 — 30:15
15. 14 - New Orleans, Louisiana, Jan 1, 1851 — 33:15
16. 15 - Charleston, South Carolina, May 1 — 27:24
17. 16 - July 17 — 22:31
18. 17 - New York, September 4 — 23:25

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.