«A sweeping saga of women and families in the frontier American West. From Bleeding Kansas to female doctors and dude ranches, Lynne Marie Getz details the story of abolitionists Augustus and Susan Wattles and their descendants. Extensively researched, Abolitionists, Doctors, Ranchers, and Writers uses the Wattles-Faunce-Wetherill family to illuminate American history."" - Nicole Etcheson, author of Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War EraM

""In Abolitionists, Doctors, Ranchers, and Writers: A Family Journey through American History, historian Lynne Getz skillfully brings to life the extended Wattles-Faunce-Wetherill family. She adeptly showcases the ideas and experiences of three generations to reveal broad forces at work in nineteenth-century American life and details one family’s encounters with antebellum antislavery and women’s rights activism, the Civil War, women’s lives and labor in and outside of the home, and the American West. In her thoughtful recounting of a fascinating family (and its memory-making about its history), Getz makes a strong case for the merits of family history as a path to enlarge and refine our understanding of American history."" - Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz, author of The Tie That Bound Us: The Women of John Brown’s Family and the Legacy of Radical Abolitionism

""Lynne Marie Getz’s book is engagingly written, with crisp story-telling and skillful use of the plentiful family letters the people come to life—as individuals, as members of a particular family, and as Americans in particular times and places that demonstrates beautifully how American history is a history of migration organized and enacted by families, who move for their own reasons, and not necessarily for the commonplace explanation of betterment on a succession of frontiers."" - Susan E. Gray, Co-editor, Contingent Maps: Rethinking Western Women’s History and the North American West »