"The definitive, dramatic biography of the most important African-American of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era. As a young man Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major...

"Chartered in 1827 as the country's first railroad, the legendary Baltimore and Ohio played a unique role in the nation's great railroad drama and became the model for American railroading. John W. Garrett, who served as president of the B&O from 1858 to 1884, ranked among the great power brokers of the time. In this gripping and well-researched account, historian Kathleen Waters Sander tells the story of the B&O's beginning and its unprecedented...

"When residents and tourists visit plantation sites, whose stories are told? All too often the lives of slaveowners are centered, obscuring the lives of enslaved people and making it impossible for their descendants to process the meanings of these sites. Behind the Big House gives readers a candid, behind the scenes look at what it really takes to interpret the difficult history of slavery in the U.S. South. The book explores Jodi Skipper's eight-year...

Finding Charity's Folk highlights the experiences of enslaved women who negotiated for their own freedom, many of whom have been largely lost to historical records. Based on more than fifteen hundred manumission records and historical documents from a diversity of archives, Jessica Millward's book skillfully brings together African American social and gender history to provide a new means of using biography as a historical genre. Millward opens with...