The FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list arose from a conversation held in late 1949 between J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, and William Kinsey Hutchinson who were discussing ways to promote capture of the FBI's "toughest guys". For sixty years, the FBI has sought the public's assistance in a special way through one of our most effective and longest running publicity programs, which, since 1950, has led to the location of more than 460 of our nation's most dangerous criminals. Content: FBI's "Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” Program: The Beginnings Today The Program Criteria for Placement on the List The List Removal from the List How the FBI Gets Its Men and Women: A 20-Year Study of the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” Program 1989-2009 Today's "Top Ten” List More Likely to Include Terrorist, Organized Crime Figures and Child Predators "Top Tenners” Cannot Hide for Long Many Fugitives Found far from Home "Top Ten” Fugitives Increasingly Caught Through Publicity Conclusion Project Pin Point Project Welcome Home America's Most Wanted Famous Cases: Thomas James Holden William Raymond Nesbit Isaie Beausoleil Clyde Edward Laws James Earl Ray Richard Lee Tingler, Jr. Ruth Eisemann-Schier Theodore Robert Bundy Eric Robert Rudolph Warren Jeffs Service Martyrs

I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! is the amazing true story of one man's search for meaning, fall from grace, and eventual victory over injustice. In 1921, Robert E. Burns was a shell-shocked and penniless veteran who found himself at the mercy of Georgia's barbaric penal system when he fell in with a gang of petty thieves. Sentenced to six to ten years' hard labor for his part in a robbery that netted less than $6.00, Burns was shackled to a county chain gang. After four months of backbreaking work, he made a daring escape, dodging shotgun blasts, racing through swamps, and eluding bloodhounds on his way north. For seven years Burns lived as a free man. He married and became a prosperous Chicago businessman and publisher. When he fell in love with another woman, however, his jealous wife turned him in to the police, who arrested him as a fugitive from justice. Although he was promised lenient treatment and a quick pardon, he was back on a chain gang within a month. Undaunted, Burns did the impossible and escaped a second time, this time to New Jersey. He was still a hunted man living in hiding when this book was first published in 1932. The book and its movie version, nominated for a Best Picture Oscar in 1933, shocked the world by exposing Georgia's brutal treatment of prisoners. I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! is a daring and heartbreaking book, an odyssey of misfortune, love, betrayal, adventure, and, above all, the unshakable courage and inner strength of the fugitive himself.

Reprinted from the series Slavery, Race and the American Legal System, 1700-1872, this set contains facsimiles of 56 rare pamphlets relating to court cases involving fugitive slaves. As in the companion set, Southern Slaves in Free State Courts, some pamphlets were part of the public debate over judicial decisions. Others used cases to promote the antislavery cause or, in some instances, support or justify slavery. "These...volumes belong in every library used for research, and in particular at all law school libraries. They will prove valuable to historians, lawyers, law teachers and students, and all persons interested in the problems of slavery and race in American experience.": William M. Wiecek, American Journal of Legal History 33 (1989) 187.