Silent stone faces on a tunnel wall in Syracuse. Ruins of the first settlement of freed men and women discovered under a saltwater marsh in Florida. Family stories leading archaeologists to an upstairs room in a Brooklyn house, where slaves were hidden. These and other archaeological sites are examined in this study of the Underground Railroad. In addition, WPA slave narratives, spirituals, quilts, a ship’s logs, diaries, eyewitness accounts, and letters all demonstrate the ways historians learn about the past—from old-fashioned studies of 17th-century church records to the space-age technology of thermal imaging. An important point made here is that the Underground Railroad was not, as often portrayed, an organized network of routes delivering escaping slaves directly to freedom in the North. There were many “freedom roads” and many people with the courage to break the law and put their lives at risk in the name of liberty and democracy. The authors portray historians as detectives, solving mysteries when history keeps a secret, and point out that this is a “living” history, “waiting for a new generation of historians, archaeologists, and researchers to continue to tell this fascinating story.” Discussions of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision, John Brown, and the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law provide additional historical context. Well-written, well-documented, imaginatively arranged, this is a fascinating offering. Handsomely organized with ten black-and-white illustrations, maps, sidebars, photographs, and other archival material, this covers much ground while saying a great deal about the historian’s craft. An important addition to library collections and classroom units. (foreword, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8126-2673-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
Whether drawn by curiosity or compelled by assignments, students of American history will find plenty of chew on in this meaty, heavily illustrated entry in the new Pages from History series. Lepore gathers extracts from letters, books, journals, sermons, advertisements, prophecies, folktales, and news reports generated by the meetings of New World and Old, chronicling the period from 1492—1789, when the autobiography of ex-slave Olaudah Equiano was published. The author opens with a discussion of what primary sources are and how to interpret them, considers each theater of contact in turn from the Caribbean islands to New England, shoehorns in a chapter on the African slave trade, and links all of her passages with analytical background notes. Beginning with a full-color section, the pictures are all, roughly, contemporary, heavy on maps that chart the world’s expansion in the European consciousness and including often fanciful scenes that in many cases are all that is left of vanished Native American cultures. Lepore dismisses connections between Asia and the Americas in a few words, and treats the Melungeon claims of descent from precolonial Turkish and African settlers in North America not at all. At her best, as when she tellingly pairs Cortez’s report of a first meeting with Montezuma with a Aztecan account, she opens windows on the different agendas and mutual incomprehension that so often turned peaceful contact into wholesale devastation. She draws from a host of hard-to-find sources, and creates a ghastly, compelling picture of one of human history’s pivotal moments. (notes, index not seen, b&w illustrations, maps, chronology, further reading) (Nonfiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: Dec. 13, 1999
ISBN: 0-19-510513-3
Page Count: 175
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
Katz (Black Women of the Old West, 1995, etc.) takes fascinating material—the tale of free and escaped African-Americans who helped colonize the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys from the late 18th-century to the middle of the 19th century—and gives it a textbook treatment. In this gathering of details and events in the lives of real people who settled the area, he presents a full history of the contributions of determined people who established schools and churches, fought slavery, and won basic civil rights. The many black-and-white period drawings and photographs help establish the people in the narrative and the facts surrounding their lives. The facts alone, one after the other, add up to a cogent picture of the growing wealth and importance of African-Americans in US history, but the dry presentation may doom it to use solely for reference or as a supplement to more inviting works. (index, not seen, maps, charts, notes, bibliography) (Nonfiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-689-81410-0
Page Count: 171
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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