First-person narratives reveal the active role slaves played in their own escapes. Shows how slaves, with the help of free blacks and some whites, risked all they had to escape to freedom.

Describes how African Americans made coded quilts and how they used them to escape on the underground railroad.

"Born free in 1821 to two parents who had been enslaved, William Still was drawn to antislavery work from a young age. Hired as a clerk at the Anti-Slavery office in Philadelphia after teaching himself to read and write, he began directly assisting enslaved people who were crossing over from the South into freedom. Andrew Diemer captures the full range and accomplishments of Still's life, from his resistance to Fugitive Slave Laws and his relationship...

Traces the story of John Rankin and the heroes of the Ripley, Ohio, line of the Underground Railroad, identifying the pre-Civil War conflicts between abolitionists and slave chasers along the Ohio River banks.

"The Underground Railroad to the North was salvation for many US slaves before the Civil War. But during the same decades, thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico. In South to Freedom historian Alice Baumgartner tells the story of Mexico's rise as an antislavery republic and a promised land for enslaved people in North America. She describes how Mexico's...

"A groundbreaking study of the first Black female novelist and her life as an enslaved woman, from the biographer who solved the mystery of her identity, with a preface by Henry Louis Gates Jr."--

Slave narratives are extremely rare, with only 55 post-Civil War narratives surviving. A mere handful are first-person accounts by slaves who ran away and freed themselves. Now two newly uncovered narratives join that exclusive group. Handed down through family and friends, they tell gripping stories of escape: Through a combination of intelligence, daring, and sheer luck, the men reached the protection of occupying Union troops. Historian Blight...

Prologue: Summer 1832: Norfolk, Virginia -- The battle engaged -- The birth of the Kidnapping Club and the rebirth of Manhattan -- New York divided -- New York, a port in the slave trade -- Policing and criminalizing the Black community -- Economic panic -- No end in sight -- New York and the transatlantic slave trade -- "Blessed be cotton!": the fugitive slave law and New York City -- The Portuguese Company -- New York and secession -- Civil war...

"A new historical anthology from transatlantic slavery to the Reconstruction curated by the Schomburg Center, that makes the case for focusing on the histories of Black people as agents and architects of their own lives and ultimate liberation, with a foreword by Kevin Young. This is the first Penguin Classics anthology published in partnership with the Schomburg Center, a world-renowned cultural institution documenting black life in America and worldwide....