Anna Elizabeth Dickinson had been one of the most famous and highly paid public speakers in the US in the 1860s, and definitely the most famous if you include ‘female’ in there. And she started speaking when she was 16 years-old.
In the days before climate control and public address system, she stood projecting her voice, captivating people for hours. Often telling people to vote for older men, men whom she was the better of in every way. She was smarter, she was more knowledgeable, she burned with her convictions about the abolition of slavery, how the civil war needed to be fought and human beings who just happened to have different skin needed to be free.
And then it slipped away.
In her original timeline, 1873 was the middle of the first decade of a long slide to irrelevancy, slowly alienating everyone she ever knew, mostly forgotten by history.
But in one thread, 31 years old Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, amid increasing tensions with her manager James Redpath, found herself confused and distracted by lights and sounds while heading home, and instead wandered into an alley, found a box, and accidentally touched a time machine she didn’t understand.
Arrived 20HY from 1873 InterAct, but always points out that is pretty irrelevant for 1873. Currently Mayor.
official Mayorial photograph
circa 1863