Noted historian Marcus Rediker has earned numerous awards for his work, including the sought-after George Washington Book Prize. In The Amistad Rebellion, he turns his attention to the famed slave ship that set sail from Havana in 1839. Painstakingly researched, Rediker's account follows the slaves' point of view, from the joyous moments after they seized the ship through the harrowing court case that would become a touchstone in the struggle for...

A deeply entrenched institution, slavery lived on legally and commercially even in the northern states that had abolished it after the American Revolution. Slaves could be found in the streets of New York well after abolition, traveling with owners doing business with the city's major banks, merchants, and manufacturers. New York was also home to the North's largest free black community, making it a magnet for fugitive slaves seeking refuge. Slave...

The consensus view of the Civil War-that it was first and foremost a war to restore the Union, and an antislavery war only later when it became necessary for Union victory-dies here. James Oakes's groundbreaking history shows how deftly Lincoln and congressional Republicans pursued antislavery throughout the war, pragmatic in policy but steadfast on principle. In the disloyal South the federal government quickly began freeing slaves, immediately and...

An award-winning scholar uncovers the guiding principles of Lincoln's antislavery strategies. Lincoln adopted the antislavery view that the Constitution made freedom the rule in the United States, slavery the exception. Where federal power prevailed, so did freedom. Where state power prevailed, that state determined the status of slavery, and the federal government could not interfere. It would take state action to achieve the final abolition of American...

Revisits the nineteenth century abolitionist movement as the embodiment of a driving force in American history, giving a better understanding of the balance between moral fervor and political responsibility.

Explores how the differing experiences and viewpoints of two Presidents shaped slavery and race relations in America for more than a century.

Maryland was the starting point of many freedom seekers. They embarked on the perilous journey from slavery to freedom in whatever way they could. John Thompson signed onto a whaling ship. James Watkins sailed to England and became a lecturer on slavery. Hester Norman fled, was caught, and was rescued by the Black community in her husband's Pennsylvania town. They used ruses, found allies and eluded slave catchers, but lived in constant fear until...

"A history of antiracist and abolitionist activism in the Civil War-era Republican Party"--

"Received 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 radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism...