(Carlisle, PA) The House Divided Project at Dickinson College has partnered with the National Park Service Network to Freedom to launch a new Underground Railroad Online Handbook that contains over twenty essays from the nation’s leading scholars on aspects of the resistance to slavery through escape and flight. Project director Matthew Pinsker served as editor for this volume, which will also soon be available in print.
URL for new site: https://housedivided.dickinson.edu/sites/ugrr/
Diane Miller from the Network to Freedom at NPS penned the Foreword with an introductory essay from Pinsker and a closing epilogue by noted scholar RJM Blackett. A section on thematic context includes essays on freedom seekers (Anthony Cohen), federal laws (Paul Finkelman), state laws (H. Robert Baker), abolitionism (Manisha Sinha), religion (Cheryl Janifer LaRoche), women (Kate Clifford Larson), revolutionary violence (Kellie Carter Jackson), antbellum politics (James Oakes), wartime escapes (Chandra Manning), historiography (Spencer Crew), and popular myths (Fergus M. Bordewich).
The regional context section offers essays on the Northwest (Déanda Johnson), Southwest (Alice L. Baumgartner), Southern Maroon communities (Damian Alan Pargas), Atlantic coastal network (Cassandra L. Newby-Alexander), Ohio River valley (Robert H. Churchill), Washington, DC region (Stanley Harrold), Middle Atlantic (Eric Foner), New England (Kathryn Grover), and Canada West (Gordon S. Barker).
The companion website also hosts several interactive tools, designed especially for use by classroom teachers and site interpreters. Visitors will find interactive timelines and maps as well as litany of downloadable images and embedded videos. In addition to all of these helpful resources, there are some unique opportunities at this online companion site for public historians, teachers, and students to make their own contributions to the evolving insights about the Underground Railroad and the fight to destroy slavery in America.
The new handbook was produced through a contract with the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), funded by the Department of the Interior, National Park Service.