Books and articles compiled from the Further Reading recommendations of our Contributors
Abbott, Elena K. Beacons of Liberty: International Free Soil and the Fight for Racial Justice in Antebellum America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Baker, H. Robert. Prigg v. Pennsylvania: Slavery, the Supreme Court, and the Ambivalent Constitution. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012.
Barker, Gordon S. Fugitive Slaves and the Unfinished American Revolution, Eight Cases, 1848-1856. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013.
Bartlett, Irving H. “Abolitionists, Fugitives, and Imposters in Boston, 1846-47.” New England Quarterly 55 (March 1982): 97-110.
Baumgartner, Alice L. South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War. New York: Basic Books, 2020.
Bentley, Judith. “Dear Friend”: Thomas Garrett and William Still, Collaborators on the Underground Railroad. New York: Cobblehill Books, 1997.
Berlin, Ira, Steven P. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds. Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985-2013.
Blackett, R. J. M. The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Resistance to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Blockson, Charles L., The Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania. Jacksonville, NC: Flame International, 1981.
Bonner, Christopher. Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.
Bordewich, Fergus M. Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America’s First Civil Rights Movement. New York: Amistad / HarperCollins, 2005.
Brown-Kubisch, Linda. The Queen’s Bush Settlement: Black Pioneers, 1839-1865. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2004.
Byrd, Brandon R. The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.
Calarco, Tom. People of the Underground Railroad: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008.
Calarco, Tom and Don Papson, Secret Lives of the Underground Railroad in New York City: Sydney Howard Gay, Louis Napoleon, and the Record of Fugitives. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015.
Campbell, Stanley W. The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850-1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970.
Churchill, Robert H. The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Clavin, Matthew J. Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Click, Patricia C. Time Full of Trial: The Roanoke Island Freedmen’s Colony, 1862-1867. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Coffin, Levi. Reminiscences of Levi Coffin. Cincinnati: Western Tract Society, 1879.
Commander, Michelle D., ed. Unsung: Unheralded Narratives of American Slavery and Abolition. New York: Penguin Press, 2021.
Cornell, Sarah. “Citizens of Nowhere,”: Fugitive Slaves and Free African Americans in Mexico, 1833-1857.” Journal of American History 100 (Sept. 2013): 351-74.
Cox, Anna-Lisa. The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality. New York: Public Affairs, 2018.
DeRamus, Betty. Freedom by Any Means: True Stories of Cunning and Courage on the Underground Railroad. New York: Atria Books, 2009.
Diouf, Sylviane. Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons. New York: New York University Press, 2016.
Drew, Benjamin. A North Side View of Slavery: The Refugee. Boston: John P. Jewett, 1856.
Epps, Kristen. Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas-Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016.
Fields, Barbara Jeanne. Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
Finkenbine, Roy E. “The Underground Railroad in ‘Indian Country’: Northwest Ohio, 1795-1843.” In Damian Alan Pargas, ed. Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018.
Finkelman, Paul. Slavery in the Courtroom. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1985.
Finkelman, Paul. Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (3rd ed.). New York: Routledge, 2014.
Finkelman, Paul. Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018.
Foner, Eric. Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad. New York: W.W. Norton, 2015.
Forbes, Ella. But We Have No Country: The 1851 Christiana, Pennsylvania Resistance. Cherry Hill, NJ: Africana Homestead Legacy, 1998.
Franklin, John Hope and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Gara, Larry. The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1961.
Grendler, Marcella, Andrew Leiter, and Jill Sexton, compilers. North American Slave Narratives. Guide to Religious Content in Slave Narratives. https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/religiouscontent.html
Griffler, Keith P., Front Line of Freedom: African Americans and the Forging of the Underground Railroad in the Ohio Valley. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004.
Grover, Kathryn. The Fugitive’s Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001.
Gurza-Lavalle, Gerardo. “Against Slave Power? Slavery and Runaway Slaves in Mexico-United States Relations, 1821-1857.” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 35 (Summer 2019): 143-70.
Hagedorn, Ann, Beyond the River: The Untold Story of the Heroes of the Underground Railroad. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002.
Harrold, Stanley. Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D.C., 1828-1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press: 2003.
Harrold, Stanley. Border War: Fighting Over Slavery Before the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
Heerman, M. Scott. The Alchemy of Slavery: Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country, 1730-1865. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.
Hodges, Graham Russell Gao. David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
Hunter, Carol M. To Set the Captives Free: Reverend Jermain Wesley Loguen and the Struggle for Freedom in Central New York 1835-1872. New York: Garland, 1993.
Jackson, Kellie Carter. Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
Kashatus, William C. William Still: The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021.
LaRoche, Cheryl Janifer. Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014.
Larson, Kate Clifford. Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003.
Lubet, Steven. Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Manning, Chandra. Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War. New York: Knopf, 2016.
Miller, Steve and J. Timothy Allen. Slave Escapes and the Underground Railroad in North Carolina. Charleston: The History Press, 2016.
Mitchell, William. The Underground Railroad: From Slavery to Freedom. London: William Tweedie, 1860.
Morris, Thomas D., Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North, 1780-1861. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.
Nichols, James David. “The Line of Liberty: Runaway Slaves and Fugitive Peons in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands.” Western Historical Quarterly 44 (Winter 2013): 413-33.
Oakes, James. The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution. New York: W.W. Norton, 2021.
Olsavsky, Jesse. “Runaway Slaves, Militant Abolitionists, and the Critique of American Prisons, 1830-60.” History Workshop Journal (2021): 1-22.
Pacheco, Josephine F. The Pearl: A Failed Slave Escape on the Potomac. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Pargas, Damian Alan, ed. Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018.
Phillips, Christopher. Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790-1860. Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1998.
Prince, Bryan. A Shadow on the Household: One Enslaved Family’s Incredible Struggle for Freedom. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2009.
Quarles, Benjamin. Black Abolitionists. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.
Reid, Richard. African Canadians in Union Blue: Volunteering for the Cause in the Civil War. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014.
Ripley, C. Peter, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol. III & IV. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Rivers, Larry Eugene. Runaways and Rebels: Slave Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013.
Robbins, Arlie C. Legacy to Buxton. North Buxton, Ontario: A. C. Robbins, 2013.
Rose, Willie Lee. Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999.
Schwartz, Rosalie. Across the Rio to Freedom: U.S. Negroes in Mexico. El Paso: University of Texas Press, 1975.
Sears, Richard D. Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002.
Sernett, Milton C. North Star Country: Upstate New York and the Crusade for African American Freedom. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001.
Siebert, Wilbur H. The Underground Railroad: From Slavery to Freedom. New York: MacMillan, 1898.
Sinha, Manisha. The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.
Slaughter, Thomas P. Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and the Racial Violence in the Antebellum North. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Smardz Frost, Karolyn. I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Smardz Frost, Karolyn and Veta Smith Tucker, eds. A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland. Detroit: Wayne State Press, 2016.
Soike, Lowell J. Necessary Courage: Iowa’s Underground Railroad in the Struggle Against Slavery. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013.
Still, William. The Underground Railroad. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872.
Taylor, Amy Murrell. Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
Torrey, E. Fuller. The Martyrdom of Abolitionist Charles Torrey. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013.
Tyler, Ronnie C., “Fugitive Slaves in Mexico.” The Journal of Negro History 57 (Jan 1972): 1-12.
Walker, Cam. “Corinth: The Story of a Contraband Camp.” Civil War History 20 (1974): 5-22.
Walker, Timothy D., ed. Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2021.
Winks, Robin W. The Blacks in Canada: A History. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997.
Zirblis, Raymond Paul. Friends of Freedom: The Vermont Underground Railroad Survey Report. Montpelier: Vermont Department of State Buildings and Vermont Division for Historic Preservation, 1996.