Draws from Frederick Douglass's own writings to provide insight into key events in his life, including his escape to New York City with the help of his future wife, Anna Murray, and his work in the abolitionist movement.

Discusses the history of the institution of slavery in the United States, abolitionism and other resistance movements, and the structure, as well as some outstanding people involved with, the Underground Railroad.

A town at the center of the United States becomes the site of an ongoing struggle for freedom and equality. In May, 1854, Massachusetts was in an uproar. A judge, bound by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, had just ordered a young African American man who had escaped from slavery in Virginia and settled in Boston to be returned to bondage in the South. An estimated fifty thousand citizens rioted in protest. Observing the scene was Amos Adams Lawrence,...

When, in 1879, a bust in his likeness was placed at the University of Rochester, Frederick Douglass wrote: "Incidents of this character do much amaze me. It is not, however, the height to which I have risen, but the depth from which I have come that amazes me." This biography tells the story of his ascent from slavery.

Within the American antislavery movement that reached its peak during the thirty years before the Civil War, abolitionists were the most outspoken opponents of slavery. They were also distinct from other members of the movement in advocating, on the basis of moral principle, the immediate emancipation of slaves and equal rights for black people. Instead of focusing on the "immediatists" as products of northern culture, as previous historians have...

Publisher description: This book is the first full-scale treatment of the only instance in history in which African blacks, seized by slave dealers, won their freedom and returned home. In 1839, Joseph Cinque led other blacks in a revolt on the Spanish slave ship, Amistad, in the Caribbean. They steered the ship northward to Montauk, Long Island, where it was seized by an American naval vessel. With the Africans jailed in Connecticut and the Spaniards...

Looks at how historians work and the clues they use to learn about the Underground Railroad, a series of secret escape routes enslaved people followed to freedom.

In the 1880s, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers,...