This enlightening study employs the tools of archaeology to uncover a new historical perspective on the Underground Railroad. Unlike previous histories of the Underground Railroad, which have focused on frightened fugitive slaves and their benevolent abolitionist accomplices, Cheryl LaRoche focuses instead on free African American communities, the crucial help they provided to individuals fleeing slavery, and the terrain where those flights to freedom occurred. This study foregrounds several small, rural hamlets on the treacherous southern edge of the free North in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. LaRoche demonstrates how landscape features such as waterways, iron forges, and caves played a key role in the conduct and effectiveness of the Underground Railroad. Rich in oral histories, maps, memoirs, and archaeological investigations, this examination of the "geography of resistance" tells the new powerful and inspiring story of African Americans ensuring their own liberation in the midst of oppression.

First published in 1898, this comprehensive history was the first documented survey of a system that helped fugitive slaves escape from areas in the antebellum South to regions as far north as Canada. Comprising fifty years of research, the text includes interviews and excerpts from diaries, letters, biographies, memoirs, speeches, and a large number of other firsthand accounts. Together, they shed much light on the origins of a system that provided aid to runaway slaves, including the degree of formal organization within the movement, methods of procedure, geographical range, leadership roles, the effectiveness of Canadian settlements, and the attitudes of courts and communities toward former slaves.

"Historically significant document by Still, a free-born Black man who became an author and abolitionist movement leader in Philadelphia, PA. The volume document the stories of escaped slaves, and remains "the only first-person account of Black activities on the Underground Railroad written and self-published by an African-America...William Still was a major contributor to the success of the Underground Railroad activities in Philadelphia and a part of Philadelphia's free Black community that played an essential role in the Underground Railroad. He personally provide room and board for many African Americans who escaped slavery and stopped in Philadelphia on their way to Canada. Through his work with the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery's Vigilance Committee, he raised funds to assist runaways and arrange their passage to the North. He was instrumental in financing several of Harriet Tubman's trips to the South to liberate enslaved Africans" (Turner, Diane D. "William Still's National Significance." Web blog post. William Still: African American Abolitionist. Temple University, n.d. 18 August, 2016)." --description from Lorne Bair Rare Books Inc., bookseller.

Employs the tools of archaeology to uncover a new historical perspective on the Underground Railroad. Unlike previous histories of the Underground Railroad, which have focused on frightened fugitive slaves and their benevolent abolitionist accomplices, this focuses instead on free African American communities, the crucial help they provided to individuals fleeing slavery, and the terrain where those flights to freedom occurred.

Describes the system by which black slaves escaped captivity in the southern United States.

A brilliant and surprising account of the coming of the American Civil War, showing the crucial role of slaves who escaped to Mexico. The Underground Railroad to the North promised salvation to many American slaves before the Civil War. But thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico, where slavery was abolished in 1837. In South to Freedom, historianAlice L. Baumgartner tells the story of why Mexico abolished slavery and how its increasingly radical antislavery policies fueled the sectional crisis in the United States. Southerners hoped that annexing Texas and invading Mexico in the 1840s would stop runaways and secure slavery's future. Instead, the seizure of Alta California and Nuevo México upset the delicate political balance between free and slave states. This is a revelatory and essential new perspective on antebellum America and the causes of the Civil War.

A new interpretation of the Underground Railroad that places violence at the center of the story.