A study of the emergence of community among African Americans in Nova Scotia.

In 1849, the Reverend William King and fifteen of his former slaves founded the Canadian settlement of Buxton on a 9,000-acre block of land in Ontario set aside for sale to blacks. Although initially opposed by some neighbouring whites, their town grew steadily in population and stature with the backing of the Presbyterian Church of Canada and various philanthropics. A developed agricultural community that supported three schools, four churches, a hotel, and a post office, Buxton was home to almost seven hundred residents at its height. The settlement (which still exists today) remained all black until 1860, when its land was opened to purchase by whites. Sharon A. Roger Hepburn's Crossing the Border tells the story of Buxton's settlers, united in their determination to live free from slavery and legal repression. It is the most comprehensive study to address life in a black community in Canada.

In the early nineteenth century, Rochester, New York, and St. Catharines, Canada West, were the last stops on the Niagara branch of the Underground Railroad. Both cities handled substantial fugitive slave traffic and were logical destinations for the settlement of runaways because of their progressive stance on social issues including abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and temperance. Moreover, these urban centers were home to sizable free Black communities as well as an array of individuals engaged in the abolitionist movement, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Anthony Burns, and Hiram Wilson. dann j. Broyld’s Borderland Blacks explores the status and struggles of transient Blacks within this dynamic zone, where the cultures and interests of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and the African Diaspora overlapped. Blacks in the two cities shared newspapers, annual celebrations, religious organizations, and kinship and friendship ties. Too often, historians have focused on the one-way flow of fugitives on the Underground Railroad from America to Canada when in fact the situation on the ground was far more fluid, involving two-way movement and social collaborations. Black residents possessed transnational identities and strategically positioned themselves near the American-Canadian border where immigration and interaction occurred. Borderland Blacks reveals that physical separation via formalized national barriers did not sever concepts of psychological memory or restrict social ties. Broyld investigates how the times and terms of emancipation affected Blacks on each side of the border, including their use of political agency to pit the United States and British Canada against one another for the best possible outcomes.

Rebels on the Border offers a remarkably compelling and significant study of the Civil War South's highly contested and bloodiest border states: Kentucky and Missouri. By far the most complex examination to date, the book sharply focuses on the "borderland" between the free North and the Confederate South. As a result, Rebels on the Border deepens and enhances understanding of the sectional conflict, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. After slaves in central Kentucky and Missouri gained their emancipation, author Aaron Astor contends, they transformed informal kin and social networks of resistance against slavery into more formalized processes of electoral participation and institution building. At the same time, white politics in Kentucky's Bluegrass and Missouri's Little Dixie underwent an electoral realignment in response to the racial and social revolution caused by the war and its aftermath. Black citizenship and voting rights provoked a violent white reaction and a cultural reinterpretation of white regional identity. After the war, the majority of wartime Unionists in the Bluegrass and Little Dixie joined former Confederate guerrillas in the Democratic Party in an effort to stifle the political ambitions of former slaves. Rebels on the Border is not simply a story of bitter political struggles, partisan guerrilla warfare, and racial violence. Like no other scholarly account of Kentucky and Missouri during the Civil War, it places these two crucial heartland states within the broad context of local, southern, and national politics.

Author Gonzales created an authentic record of African American character sketches and dialect in his Gullah stories of the Carolina coast, originally published as this collection in 1922.

This new book on Black public schooling in St. Louis is the first to fully explore deep racialized antagonisms in St. Louis, Missouri. It accomplishes this by addressing the white supremacist context and anti-Black policies that resulted. In addition, this work attends directly to community agitation and protest against racist school policies. The book begins with post-Civil War schooling of Black children to the important Liddell case that declared unconstitutional the St. Louis Public Schools. The judicial wrangling in the Liddell case, its aftermath, and community reaction against it awaits a next book by the authors of Anti-blackness and public schools.