"The classic boyhood adventure tale, updated with a new introduction by noted Mark Twain scholar R. Kent Rasmussen In recent years, neither the persistent effort to "clean up" the racial epithets in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn nor its consistent use in the classroom have diminished, highlighting the novel's wide-ranging influence and its continued importance in American society. An incomparable adventure story, it is a vignette of...

Recounts the journey of Black slaves to freedom via the underground railroad, an extended group of people who helped fugitive slaves in many ways.

One May night in 1861, three slaves escaped a Confederate camp and rowed across the harbor to the Union line. Frank Baker, James Townsend, and Shepard Mallory didn't know what they would find across the water, but they knew it had to be better than what they left behind. Union General Benjamin Butler considered the men's plight. The Fugitive Slave Act required him to return the runaways to their master. But what if they were declared "contraband...

A magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. Cora is a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood-where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes...

For decades after its founding, America was really two nations--one slave, one free. There were many reasons why this composite nation ultimately broke apart, but the fact that enslaved black people repeatedly risked their lives to flee their masters in the South in search of freedom in the North proved that the "united" states was actually a lie. Fugitive slaves exposed the contradiction between the myth that slavery was a benign institution and...

"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."--

"Josiah Henson was born into slavery in La Plata, Maryland, and auctioned off as a child to pay his owner's debt. After numerous trials and abuse, he earned the trust of his slaveholder by exhibiting intelligence and skill. Daringly, he escaped to Canada with his wife and children. There he established a settlement and school for fugitives and repeatedly returned to the United States to help lead others to freedom along the Underground Railroad. He...

Enslaved Virginians sought freedom from the time they were first brought to the Jamestown colony in 1619. Acts of self-emancipation were aided by Virginia's waterways, which became part of the network of the Underground Railroad in the years before the Civil War. Watermen willing to help escaped slaves made eighteenth-century Norfolk a haven for freedom seekers. Famous nineteenth-century escapees like Shadrack Minkins and Henry "Box" Brown were aided...

"Because something is happening, in the distance, approaching from above and below. Weird holes are appearing. I'm often drawn by a void. And that might be the reason I have started to speak. So says the Scatterwind, the narrator in Robert Perisic's latest novel, A Cat at the Edge of the World. Defying the realms of time and space, the Scatterwind is a knowing presence throughout this story, which spans from the time of ancient Sparta to our contemporary...