Few things have defined America as much as slavery. In the wake of emancipation the story of the Underground Railroad has become a seemingly irresistible part of American historical consciousness. This stirring drama is one Americans have needed to tell and retell and pass on to their children. But just how much of the Underground Railroad is real, how much legend and mythology, how much invention? Passages to Freedom sets out to answer this question and place it within the context of slavery, emancipation, and its aftermath.
Published on the occasion of the opening of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, Passages to Freedom brings home the reality of slavery's destructiveness. This distinguished yet accessible volume offers a galvanizing look at how the brave journey out of slavery both haunts and inspires us today.

Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory

History

Blight, David

Americas

Harper Paperbacks

In this edition of Souls of Black Folk, the original 1903 version of the W.E.B. Du Bois's classic is combined with the fullest set of annotations yet, two related essays, and numerous letters Du Bois received and wrote concerning his widely read text.

The Souls of Black Folk (Bedford Series in History and Culture)

Literature & Fiction

DU BOIS, W.E.B.

Gooding-Williams, Robert

United States

Bedford/St.Martin's

Slave narratives are extremely rare. Of the one hundred or so of these testimonies that survive, a mere handful are first-person accounts by slaves who ran away and freed themselves. Now two newly uncovered narratives, and the biographies of the men who wrote them, join that exclusive group.Wallace Turnage was a teenage field hand on an Alabama plantation, John Washington an urban slave in Virginia. They never met. But both men saw opportunity in the chaos of the Civil War, both escaped North, and both left us remarkable accounts of their flights to freedom. Handed down through family and friends these narratives tell gripping stories of escape. Working from an unusual abundance of genealogical material, historian David W. Blight has reconstructed Turnage’s and Washington’s childhoods as sons of white slaveholders and their climb to black working-class stability in the North, where they reunited their families. In A Slave No More, the untold stories of two ordinary men take their place at the heart of the American experience.

A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Random House Audio |

Get to know the iconic historical figure, Frederick Douglass through his story and his writing as the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass details his entire bioography from where his inspiration came from as well as what impact he had on contemporary fiction.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Written by Himself (The Bedford Series in History and Culture)

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Books by Blight, David