"Picturing Frederick Douglass is a work that promises to revolutionize our knowledge of race and photography in nineteenth-century America. Teeming with historical detail, it is filled with surprises, chief among them the fact that neither George Custer nor Walt Whitman, and not even Abraham Lincoln, was the most photographed American of that century. In fact, it was Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) the ex-slave turned leading abolitionist, eloquent...

"A riveting collection of the hardships, hairbreadth escapes, and mortal struggles of enslaved people seeking freedom: These are the true stories of the Underground Railroad. Featuring a powerful introduction by Ta-Nehisi Coates As a conductor for the Underground Railroad -- the covert resistance network created to aid and protect slaves seeking freedom -- William Still helped as many as eight hundred people escape enslavement. He also meticulously...

"An exploration of the ways faith animated the life and activism of Sojourner Truth, pathbreaking abolitionist and suffragette"--

Examines the life of the nineteenth-century author famous for the novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which denounced slavery and intensified the disagreement between the North and South. Examina la vida del autor del siglo XIX famoso por la novela "La cabaña del tío Tom", que denunció la esclavitud y se intensificó el desacuerdo entre el norte y el sur.

"Born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Samuel Ringgold Ward (1817-c. 1869) escaped enslavement and would become a leading figure in the struggle for Black freedom, citizenship, and equality. He was extolled by his contemporary Frederick Douglass for his "depth of thought, fluency of speech, readiness of wit, logical exactness." Until now, his story has been largely untold. Ward, a newspaper editor, Congregational minister, and advocate for the temperance...

"Up to this year I have always felt that I had no particular call to meddle with this subject.... But I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak." Thus did Harriet Beecher Stowe announce her decision to begin work on what would become one of the most influential novels ever written. The subject she had hesitated to "meddle with" was slavery, and the novel, of course,...

"Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) was for a time one of America's most beloved authors, known for household manuals and children's poems, including the immortal "Over the River and Through the Wood." But in 1833, having converted to the abolitionist cause, Child published An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, the first book-length condemnation of slavery printed in the United States. Child's book created an immediate uproar and...

Master storyteller and bestselling historian H. W. Brands narrates the epic struggle over slavery as embodied by John Brown and Abraham Lincoln—two men moved to radically different acts to confront our nation’s gravest sin.
 
John Brown was a charismatic and deeply religious man who heard the God of the Old Testament speaking to him, telling him to destroy slavery by any means. When Congress opened Kansas territory...

"Frederick Douglass's fluid, changeable sense of his own life story is reflected in the many conflicting accounts he gave of key events and relationships during his journey from slavery to freedom. Nevertheless, when these differing self-presentations are put side by side and consideration is given individually to their rhetorical strategies and historical moment, what emerges is a fascinating collage of Robert S. Levine's elusive subject. The Lives...