Decades before the Civil War, Illinois’s status as a free state beckoned enslaved people, particularly those in Kentucky and Missouri, to cross porous river borders and travel toward new lives. While traditional histories of the Undergroun…

A riveting account of the extraordinary abolitionist, liberator, and writer Thomas Smallwood, who bought his own freedom, led hundreds out of slavery, and named the underground railroad, from Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist, S…

Unearthing the progenitors of the Haitian Revolution has been a historical project of two hundred years. In A Secret among the Blacks, John D. Garrigus introduces two dozen Black men and women and their communities whose decades of resista…

Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial RevolutionMaxine Berg, Pat HudsonThe role of slavery in driving Britain's economic development is often debated but seldom given a central place. In their remarkable new book, Maxine Berg and Pat Huds…

With Slavery, Capitalism, and Women’s Literature, Kristin Allukian makes an important contribution to slavery and capitalism scholarship by including the voices of some of the best-known nineteenth-century American women writers. Women’s l…

Historian Jonathan W. White tells the riveting story of Appleton Oaksmith, a swashbuckling sea captain whose life intersected with some of the most important moments, movements, and individuals of the mid-19th century, from the California …