Octavius Valentine Catto was an orator who shared stages with Frederick Douglass, a second baseman on Philadelphia’s best black baseball team, a teacher at the city’s finest black school and an activist who fought in the state capital and on the streets for equal rights. With his racially-charged murder, the nation lost a civil rights pioneer—one who risked his life a century before Selma and Birmingham.In Tasting Freedom Murray Dubin and Pulitzer Prize winner Dan Biddle p...

The definitive biography of one of the most courageous women in American history "reveals Harriet Tubman to be even more remarkable than her legend" ( Newsday).Celebrated for her exploits as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman has entered history as one of nineteenth-century America's most enduring and important figures. But just who was this remarkable woman? To John Brown, leader of the Harper's Ferry slave uprising, she was General Tu...

The classic history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of enslaved people.**"Gripping." —**New York Times**“A stinging indictment of slavery.” —**NPR Books?Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution—the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bon...

New York Times Bestseller: A "fascinating portrait" of one of the men enslaved by James and Dolley Madison, and his journey toward freedom ( Publishers Weekly).Paul Jennings was born into slavery on the plantation of James and Dolley Madison in Virginia, later becoming part of the Madison household staff at the White House. Once he was finally emancipated by Senator Daniel Webster later in life, he would give an aged and impoveri...

From Midnight to Dawn presents compelling portraits of the men and women who established the Underground Railroad and traveled it to find new lives in Canada. Evoking the turmoil and controversies of the time, Tobin illuminates the historic events that forever connected American and Canadian history by giving us the true stories behind well-known figures such as Harriet Tubman and John Brown. She also profiles lesser-known but equally heroic figures such as Mary Ann Shadd, who bec...

The largest mass escape of fugitive slaves in American history is thrillingly chronicled in this "readable . . . valuable account" ( Kirkus).On the evening of April 15, 1848, nearly eighty enslaved Americans attempted one of history's most audacious escapes. Setting sail from Washington, D.C., on a schooner named the Pearl, the fugitives began a daring 225-mile journey to freedom in the North—and put in motion a furiously fought battle over slavery...

How a young general shaped a nation — a fascinating account of George Washington as he faced a war and came out as America's first presidentThe American Revolution was won not on the battlefields, but through the mind of George Washington. One of America's founding fathers, Washington's story is one that influenced how our entire nation was built. A compulsively readable narrative and extensive history, George Washington's War illuminates how during the wa...

The Red Record is Ida B. Wells-Barnett's searing 1895 investigation into lynching in the post-Reconstruction United States, combining statistical evidence, newspaper analysis, eyewitness testimony, and moral argument. Written in a lucid, prosecutorial style, the work exposes the false mythology that lynching was a response to sexual crime and instead situates racial terror within systems of economic competition, white supremacy, and political disenfranchisement. It stands as a foundational...

A look at how some of America's founding fathers—who fought for liberty and justice for all—were slave owners."[A] powerful examination of five enslaved individuals and their presidential owners. . . . In a thoroughly researched and reasoned account, Davis exposes the intricacies of this impossibly tangled web." — Publishers Weekly, starred reviewThrough the powerful stories of five enslaved people who were "owned" by four of our gre...

"Traces the history of abolition from the 1600s to the 1860s . . . a valuable addition to our understanding of the role of race and racism in America."— Florida CourierReceived historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radic...

Abraham H. Galloway (1837–1870) was a fiery young slave rebel, radical abolitionist, and Union spy who rose out of bondage to become one of the most significant and stirring black leaders in the South during the Civil War. Throughout his brief, mercurial life, Galloway fought against slavery and injustice. He risked his life behind enemy lines, recruited black soldiers for the North, and fought racism in the Union army’s ranks. He also stood at the forefront of an African American politica...

"Leave now, or die!" Those words-or ones just as ominous-have echoed through the past hundred years of American history, heralding a very unnatural disaster-a wave of racial cleansing that wiped out or drove away black populations from counties across the nation. While we have long known about horrific episodes of lynching in the South, this story of racial cleansing has remained almost entirely unknown. These expulsions, always swift and often violent, were extraordinarily widesp...