Vigilance: The Life of William Still by Andrew K. Diemer

Posted by on Sep 18, 2023 in | Comments Off on Vigilance: The Life of William Still by Andrew K. Diemer Vigilance The Life of William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad by Andrew K. Diemer Alfred A. Knopf, 432 pp., hardcover $30 William Still, the Underground Railroad’s most indefatigable agent, was born in New Jersey to formerly enslaved parents in 1821. He moved to Philadelphia in search of work when he was about 23, having already imbibed from his family a keen sense of responsibility to...
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The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown by Martha J. Cutter

Posted by on Sep 18, 2023 in | Comments Off on The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown by Martha J. Cutter The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown by Martha J. Cutter University of Pennsylvania Press, 368 pp., hardcover $49.95 Brown’s ingenious escape from slavery in Richmond, Virginia, by mailing himself in a wooden postal crate to abolitionists in Philadelphia, was unique and well documented. But that is not the story that most interests the author of this elegant cultural history. Cutter focuses...
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Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania by Beverly C. Tomek

Posted by on May 13, 2022 in | Comments Off on Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania by Beverly C. Tomek Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania by Beverly C. Tomek Temple University Press, 144 pp., paperback $19.95 For generations, textbook histories discussing Pennsylvania and slavery made Pennsylvania look good. They focused on Quaker antislavery activism, passage of a pathbreaking gradual abolition law, and the emergence of a series of notable antislavery leaders, both African American and white....
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Thaddeus Stevens by Bruce Levine

Posted by on Dec 1, 2021 in | Comments Off on Thaddeus Stevens by Bruce Levine Thaddeus Stevens Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice by Bruce Levine Simon & Schuster, 309 pp., hardcover $28 In most respects a conventional biography, Thaddeus Stevens revisits the life and times of a consequential American character. Levine limns the forces that shaped Stevens’ sensibility and his commitment to racial justice as his most notable cause. Stevens’ family...
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The Manumission of Samuel Stephens

Posted by on Mar 19, 2021 in | Comments Off on The Manumission of Samuel Stephens In 1783 Stuart George Dallas and his wife Elizabeth, formerly of the island of Jamaica, filed a manumission contract in Philadelphia for enslaved 12-year-old Samuel “Sammy” Stephens. George Bryan of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ordered a writ of habeas corpus for Samuel Stephens to be brought before him on July 1, 1786. The manumission contract, pictured here, is preserved in the Pennsylvania...
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From the Executive Director

Posted by on Oct 8, 2020 in | Comments Off on From the Executive Director Places can change you. Ordinarily, I write about Pennsylvania history here. But I recently returned from a trip to Montgomery, Alabama, and I came home a different person. Montgomery was not on my radar as a destination. Having little time to prepare for my trip (and consequently few expectations) left me wide open to surprise and to change. The city is home to two of our nation’s most...
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Three Generations on the Underground Railroad: The Gibbons Family of Lancaster County

Posted by on Apr 16, 2020 in | Comments Off on Three Generations on the Underground Railroad: The Gibbons Family of Lancaster County Shortly after sunset, a fugitive slave from Maryland tapped on a window of a modest farmhouse near Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania. Daniel and Hannah Gibbons walked swiftly to the door. The Quaker couple escorted the young man to the barn to sleep and in the morning summoned him back to the house. If the fugitive’s owner was in close pursuit, they would send him to another farm. If there seemed to be...
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To Form a More Perfect Union: Violet Oakley’s Murals in the Pennsylvania Senate Chamber

Posted by on Apr 15, 2020 in | Comments Off on To Form a More Perfect Union: Violet Oakley’s Murals in the Pennsylvania Senate Chamber At breakfast tables on Sunday morning, December 3, 1911, readers of The New York Times were confronted with a surprising headline running across the magazine section: “A WOMAN CHOSEN TO COMPLETE THE ABBEY PAINTINGS.” Four months earlier, the news that the American artist Edwin Austin Abbey (1852–1911) had passed away in London raised speculation about who would receive the remainder of his...
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Shippensburg’s Locust Grove Cemetery

Posted by on Dec 31, 2019 in | Comments Off on Shippensburg’s Locust Grove Cemetery The town of Shippensburg, in the heart of the Cumberland Valley, was first settled in the 1730s. Some of the Europeans who moved into the area brought African American slaves with them. The exact number of slaves is unknown; it was not until after Pennsylvania’s 1780 Act for the Gradual Emancipation of Slavery that the numbers of slaves and slaveholders were recorded. Nevertheless, Shippensburg,...
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The Fearless Benjamin Lay by Marcus Rediker

Posted by on Nov 12, 2019 in | Comments Off on The Fearless Benjamin Lay by Marcus Rediker The Fearless Benjamin Lay The Quaker Dwarf Who Became The First Revolutionary Abolitionist by Marcus Rediker Beacon Press, 224 pp., cloth $26.95 Who cares about Benjamin Lay (1682–1759), a 4-foot-tall, malformed, 18th-century member of a minority religious network known as the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)? Until recently, not very many people. But in seven gracefully crafted chapters...
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