Anna Dickinson's career as an orator began in her teenage years, when she gave her first impassioned speech on women's rights. By the age of twenty-one, she was spending at least six months per year on the road, delivering lectures on abolitionism, politics, and public affairs, and establishing herself as one of the nation's first celebrities. In March 1875, Dickinson departed from Washington, D.C., for an extended tour of the South, curious to see how far the region had progressed in the decade after Appomattox.

In A Tour of Reconstruction, editor J. Matthew Gallman compiles...