Building Community Through Reading
CNY READS one book . . .
2025-26
Dreams of
Freedom
In Honor of the 200th Anniversary of the Erie Canal
CNY Reads 2025-26
DREAMS OF FREEDOM by Marilyn Higgins
CNY Reads invites you to read our current selection, Dreams of Freedom, by Marilyn Higgins. Then join us at one of our book discussions or other free events.
Millions of immigrants were entering America’s heartland. Anti-Catholic bigotry and the seething national divide over slavery were soon to erupt in mob violence. Thousands of religious zealots could be heard chanting at revival meetings in upstate New York. Native people were being forced off ancestral lands.
In this chaotic setting, twenty-year-old Irish immigrant, Aileen O’Malley, came in search of her indentured father and kidnapped younger siblings, stepping into the epicenter of a growing maelstrom of violence along the Erie Canal.
Deeply relieved to have escaped a powerful man intent on forcing her to marry him in Ireland, Aileen falls in love with a vibrant, idealistic abolitionist, Jedidiah, who helps her desperate search for her family, with the odds of finding them dwindling by the day.
They encounter violence, slave-catchers, charlatans, and tragedy. After witnessing an enslaved man and woman taking their own lives to escape re-capture, they commit their souls and energies to the abolitionist movement.
Aileen collaborates with Frederick Douglass on his trip to Ireland, works with Elizabeth Cady-Stanton on women’s rights, and becomes a cunning operative with Gerrit Smith and Stephen Meyers on the last leg of escape to Canada via the Underground Railroad.
When she discovers her sister living in a utopian community with unconventional sexual practices, she leads a rescue that ultimately reunites her family and presages the Civil War to come.
Aileen’s journey provides a sometimes breathtaking close-up view of the people, places, and events that shaped young America before the Civil War.
About the Author
Marilyn Higgins has spent her life living and working in the cities, small towns and places of extraordinary natural beauty that comprise upstate New York. Her passion for the area’s rich history and belief in its profound impact on America’s national identity motivated her to write “Dreams of Freedom.”
As the chief economic development officer for National Grid (Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation) and later Syracuse University, she was told intriguing stories, visited mysterious mansions and was shown the hidden artifacts of the Erie Canal communities. Her fascination with these places, where new religions were born and waves of immigrants, abolitionism, women’s rights and Haudenosaunee culture entwined in the 19th century continues.
A twenty-year volunteer with the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor, she is currently working with the National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum and her home community of Canastota, New York to promote the “Abolitionist Freedom Walk,” a public reenactment of the storied 1835 canal journey and march of 104 abolitionists up a steep nine-mile embankment to form the New York Anti-Slavery Society.
Visit the authors website for other events: marilynhigginsauthor
Massachusetts
& Connecticut
Garden Ramble
2022
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