An introduction to the Underground Railroad shares the real-life experiences of those who participated in the railroad, along with the story of escaped slave and American Girl Addy.

"An award-winning scholar uncovers Lincoln's strategy for abolishing slavery in this groundbreaking history of the sectional crisis and Civil War. Some celebrate Lincoln for freeing the slaves; others fault him for a long-standing conservatism on abolition and race. James Oakes gives us another option in this brilliant exploration of Lincoln and the end of slavery. Through the unforeseen challenges of the Civil War crisis, Lincoln and the Republican...

Presents the life of abolitionist John Brown, discussing his early opposition to slavery, his ill-fated raid on the United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, in 1859, and the impact of his actions on the antislavery movement.

Publisher's description: Frederick Douglass was the most important African American of the nineteenth century and one of the most significant writers and orators in American history. David Blight's long-awaited authoritative biography of this great American is based in part on papers never seen by previous biographers. Douglass was born a slave and escaped at the age of twenty. He was fortunate to have learned to read as a boy, and he would develop...

"What do moral people do when democracy countenances evil? The question, implicit in the idea that people can govern themselves, came to a head in America at the middle of the nineteenth century, in the struggle over slavery. John Brown's answer was violence--violence of a sort some in later generations would call terrorism. Brown was a deeply religious man who heard the God of the Old Testament speaking to him, telling him to do whatever was necessary...

"Steve Inskeep tells the riveting story of John and Jessie Frémont, the husband and wife team who in the 1800s were instrumental in the westward expansion of the United States, and thus became America's first great political couple. John Frémont grew up amid family tragedy and shame. Born out of wedlock in 1813, he went to work at age thirteen to help support his family in Charleston, South Carolina. He was a nobody. Yet, by the 1840s, he rose to...