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Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance

Online ISBN:
9780252095894
Print ISBN:
9780252038044
Publisher:
University of Illinois Press
Book

Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance

Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
University of Maryland, College Park
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Published online:
20 April 2017
Published in print:
15 December 2013
Online ISBN:
9780252095894
Print ISBN:
9780252038044
Publisher:
University of Illinois Press

Abstract

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, this book 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 book foregrounds several small, rural hamlets on the treacherous southern edge of the free North in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. It 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.

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