From John Hope Franklin, America's foremost African American historian, comes this groundbreaking analysis of slave resistance and escape. A sweeping panorama of plantation life before the Civil War, this book reveals that slaves frequently rebelled against their masters and ran away from their plantations whenever they could.
For generations, important aspects about slave life on the plantations of the American South have remained shrouded. Historians thought, for instance, that slaves were generally pliant and resigned to their roles as human chattel, and that racial violence on the plantation was an aberration. In this precedent setting book, John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger demonstrate that, contrary to popular belief, significant numbers of slaves did in fact frequently rebel against their masters and struggled to attain their freedom. By surveying a wealth of documents, such as planters' records, petitions to county courts and state legislatures, and local newspapers, this book shows how slaves resisted, when, where, and how they escaped, where they fled to, how long they remained in hiding, and how they survived away from the plantation. Of equal importance, it examines the reactions of the white slaveholding class, revealing how they marshaled considerable effort to prevent runaways, meted out severe punishments, and established patrols to hunt down escaped slaves.
Reflecting a lifetime of thought by our leading authority in African American history, this book provides the key to truly understanding the relationship between slaveholders and the runaways who challenged the system--illuminating as never before the true nature of the South's "most peculiar institution."

Mary Parrish was reading in her home when the Tulsa race massacre began on the evening of May 31, 1921. Parrish's daughter, Florence Mary, called the young journalist and teacher to the window. "Mother," she said, "I see men with guns." The two eventually fled into the night under a hail of bullets and unwittingly became eyewitnesses to one of the greatest race tragedies in American history. Spurred by word that a young Black man was about to be lynched for stepping on a white woman's foot, a three-day riot erupted that saw the death of hundreds of Black Oklahomans and the destruction of the Greenwood district, a prosperous, primarily Black area known nationally as Black Wall Street. The murdered were buried in mass graves, thousands were left homeless, and millions of dollars worth of Black-owned property was burned to the ground. The incident, which was hidden from history for decades, is now recognized as one of the worst episodes of racial violence in the United States. The Nation Must Awake, published for a wide audience for the first time, is Parrish's first-person account, along with the recollections of dozens of others, compiled immediately following the tragedy under the name Events of the Tulsa Race Disaster. With meticulous attention to detail that transports readers to those fateful days, Parrish documents the magnitude of the loss of human life and property at the hands of white vigilantes. The testimonies shine light on Black residents' bravery and the horror of seeing their neighbors gunned down and their community lost to flames. Parrish hoped that her book would "open the eyes of the thinking people to the impending danger of letting such conditions exist and in the 'Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.' " Although the story is a hundred years old, elements of its racial injustices are still being replayed in the streets of America today. Includes an afterword by Anneliese M. Bruner, Parrish's great-granddaughter, and an introduction by the late historian John Hope Franklin and Scott Ellsworth, author of The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice.

From Slavery to Freedom remains the most revered, respected, and honored text on the market. The preeminent history of African Americans, this best-selling text charts the journey of African Americans from their origins in Africa, through slavery in the Western Hemisphere, struggles for freedom in the West Indies, Latin America, and the United States, various migrations, and the continuing quest for racial equality. Building on John Hope Franklin's classic work, the ninth edition has been thoroughly rewritten by the award-winning scholar Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. It includes new chapters and updated information based on the most current scholarship. With a new narrative that brings intellectual depth and fresh insight to a rich array of topics, the text features greater coverage of ancestral Africa, African American women, differing expressions of protest, local community activism, black internationalism, civil rights and black power, as well as the election of our first African American president in 2008. The text also has a fresh new 4-color design with new charts, maps, photographs, paintings, and illustrations. Instructors and students can now access their course content through the Connect digital learning platform by purchasing either standalone Connect access or a bundle of print and Connect access. McGraw-Hill Connect (R) is a subscription-based learning service accessible online through your personal computer or tablet. Choose this option if your instructor will require Connect to be used in the course. Your subscription to Connect includes the following: * SmartBook (R) - an adaptive digital version of the course textbook that personalizes your reading experience based on how well you are learning the content. * Access to your instructor's homework assignments, quizzes, syllabus, notes, reminders, and other important files for the course. * Progress dashboards that quickly show how you are performing on your assignments and tips for improvement. * The option to purchase (for a small fee) a print version of the book. This binder-ready, loose-leaf version includes free shipping. Complete system requirements to use Connect can be found here: http://www.mheducation.com/highered/platforms/connect/training-support-students.html

This new, bold, precedent-setting study conclusively demonstrates that, contrary to popular belief, significant numbers of slaves did quite frequently rebel against their masters and struggled to attain their freedom. By surveying a wealth of documents, such as planters' records, petitions to county courts and state legislatures, and local newspapers, the book shows readers how slaves resisted; when, where, and how they escaped; where they fled to; how long they remained in hiding; and how they survived away from the plantation. Of equal importance, it also examines the reactions of the white slaveholding class, revealing how they marshaled considerable effort to prevent runaways, meted out severe punishments, and established patrols to hunt down escaped slaves.

Reflecting a lifetime of thought by one of our leading authorities on African-American history, Runaway Slaves illuminates as never before the true nature of that "most peculiar institution" of the South.

In 1957, the University of Chicago Press asked acclaimed best-selling historian Daniel J. Boorstin to oversee a series of accessible yet authoritative books that, together, would tell the whole history of the American people. The result, published over the course of nearly half a century, is the "Chicago History of American Civilization" series, which provides a nuanced and vibrant portrait of the United States from its inception through the twentieth century. Scholars across many disciplines contributed, and the series covers a broad range of topics, as disparate as the War of 1812, immigration, and American folklore. While the series is certainly eclectic, the books share both ambition and authority - they have been staples for teachers and general readers alike. The authors included in this series represent some of the greatest academic talents ever to turn their mind to the American past. Thus the University of Chicago Press is excited to offer new editions of three of the series' best-known books. "Reconstruction after the Civil War" explores the role of former slaves during this period in American history. Looking past popular myths and controversial scholarship, John Hope Franklin uses his astute insight and careful research to provide an accurate, comprehensive portrait of the era. His arguments concerning the brevity of the North's occupation, the limited power wielded by former slaves, the influence of moderate Southerners, the flawed constitutions of the radical state governments, and the downfall of Reconstruction remain compelling today. This new edition of "Reconstruction after the Civil War" also includes a foreword by Eric Foner and a perceptive essay by Michael W. Fitzgerald.

This is a new release of the original 1947 edition.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

A white Kentuckian, itinerant Methodist preacher, and antislavery spokesman, James T. Ayers moved to Illinois before the Civil War and, though nearly fifty-seven years old, enlisted in an Illinois regiment in 1862. In February 1864, he was dispatched as a recruiter for the U.S. Colored Troops in the Tennessee Valley and began this diary recounting his experiences, including his recruiting tactics, the difficulties he encountered in enemy territory, and the lack of interest on the part of many slaves and freedmen in joining the U.S. Colored Troops.

Edited by John Hope Franklin, who conducted impressive research in then little-used sources at the National Archives, Ayers's diary documents more than the black recruiting process. It also candidly reveals the complex attitudes of a northern white preacher regarding the war, race, and the Confederacy. For this edition, Franklin provides a preface and John David Smith offers a new introduction, explaining why Ayers's poignant text remains a telling and important source in contemporary scholarship.

John Hope Franklin lived through America's most defining twentieth-century transformation, the dismantling of legally protected racial segregation. A renowned scholar, he has explored that transformation in its myriad aspects, notably in his 3.5-million-copy bestseller, "From Slavery to Freedom." Born in 1915, he, like every other African American, could not help but participate: he was evicted from whites-only train cars, confined to segregated schools, threatened--once with lynching--and consistently subjected to racism's denigration of his humanity. Yet he managed to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard; become the first black historian to assume a full professorship at a white institution, Brooklyn College; and be appointed chair of the University of Chicago's history department and, later, John B. Duke Professor at Duke University. He has reshaped the way African American history is understood and taught and become one of the world's most celebrated historians, garnering over 130 honorary degrees. But Franklin's participation was much more fundamental than that.
From his effort in 1934 to hand President Franklin Roosevelt a petition calling for action in response to the Cordie Cheek lynching, to his 1997 appointment by President Clinton to head the President's Initiative on Race, and continuing to the present, Franklin has influenced with determination and dignity the nation's racial conscience. Whether aiding Thurgood Marshall's preparation for arguing "Brown v. Board of Education" in 1954, marching to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, or testifying against Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987, Franklin has pushed the national conversation on race toward humanity and equality, a life long effort that earned him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in 1995. Intimate, at times revelatory, "Mirror to America" chronicles Franklin's life and this nation's racial transformation in the twentieth century, and is a powerful reminder of the extent to which the problem of America remains the problem of color.

John Hope (1868-1936), the first African American president of Morehouse College and Atlanta University, was one of the most distinguished in the pantheon of early-twentieth-century black educators. Born of a mixed-race union in Augusta, Georgia, shortly after the Civil War, Hope had a lifelong commitment to black public and private education, adequate housing and health care, job opportunities, and civil rights that never wavered. Hope became to black college education what Booker T. Washington was to black industrial education.

Leroy Davis examines the conflict inherent in Hope's attempt to balance his joint roles as college president and national leader. Along with his good friend W. E. B. Du Bois, Hope was at the forefront of the radical faction of black leaders in the early twentieth century, but he found himself taking more moderate stances in order to obtain philanthropic funds for black higher education. The story of Hope's life illuminates many complexities that vexed African American leaders in a free but segregated society.

"A Clashing of the Soul is a deeply researched, sensitive, and balanced account of the extraordinary career of an individual whose life was spent in combating the malignant consequences of racism. It is a first-class piece of historical scholarship". -- Willard B. Gatewood, author of Black Americans and the White Man's Burden, 1898-1903

My father's life represented many layers of the human experience, freedman and Native American, farmer and rancher, rural educator and urban professional. - John Hope Franklin Buck Colbert Franklin (1879-1960) led an extraordinary life; from his youth in what was then the Indian Territory to his practice of law in twentieth-century Tulsa, he was an observant witness to the changes in politics, law, daily existence, and race relations that transformed the wide-open Southwest. Fascinating in its depiction of an intelligent young man's coming of age in the days of the Land Rush and the closing of the frontier, My Life and an Era is equally important for its reporting of the triracial culture of early Oklahoma. Recalling his boyhood spent in the Chickasaw Nation, Franklin suggests that blacks fared better in Oklahoma in the days of the Indians than they did later with the white population. In addition to his insights about the social milieu, he offers youthful reminiscences of mustangs and mountain lions, of farming and ranch life, that might appear in a Western novel. After returning from college in Nashville and Atlanta, Franklin married a college classmate, studied law by mail, passed the bar, and struggled to build a practice in Springer and Ardmore in the first years of Oklahoma statehood. Eventually a successful attorney in Tulsa, he was an eyewitness to a number of important events in the Southwest, including the Tulsa race riot of 1921, which left more than 100 dead. His account clearly shows the growing racial tensions as more and more people moved into the state in the period leading up to World War II. Rounded out by an older man's reflections on race, religion, culture, and law, My Life and an Era presents a true, firsthand account of a unique yet defining place and time in the nation's history, as told by an eloquent and impassioned writer.

John Hope Franklin has devoted his professional life to the study of African Americans. Originally published in 1943 by UNC Press, "The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860" was his first book on the subject. As Franklin shows, freed slaves in the antebellum South did not enjoy the full rights of citizenship. Even in North Carolina, reputedly more liberal than most southern states, discriminatory laws became so harsh that many voluntarily returned to slavery.

In Race and History, John Hope Franklin, one of the nation's foremost historians, collects twenty-seven of his most influential shorter writings. The essays are presented thematically and include pieces on southern history; significant but neglected historical figures; historiography; the connection between historical problems and contemporary issues; and the public role of the historian. Collectively these essays reveal Franklin as a man who has exhibited immense courage and intellectual independence in the face of cultural and social bias, a scholar who has set the tone and direction for twentieth-century African-American studies, and a writer whose insistence on balance and truth has inspired two generations of historians. PRAISE FOR THE BOOK "These essays are examples of first-rate scholarship. Even when treading his way through the most treacherous issue of American life, race, Franklin is a model for us all...To read this collection is to be reminded of just how important John Hope Franklin has been in the historical profession." -Dan T. Carter, Emory University "This book is packed full of hard truths that needed saying. It is our fortune that they are said so well and in a voice that carries much authority." -C. Vann Woodward, New Republic "Readers will find these twenty-seven essays eloquent, barbed, timely and outspoken. Franklin's assessment of a widening socioeconomic chasm between blacks and whites, his sweeping surveys of racism from the American Revolution to the Civil War and beyond, are hard-hitting." -Publisher's Weekly "Franklin is a brilliant teacher, with something to teach us all. If only we will listen." - Christian Science Monitor John Hope Franklin is James B. Duke Professor of History Emeritus and professor of legal history at Duke University. He has received more than eighty honorary degrees. His books include From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans; Racial Equality in America; A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Antebellum North; and George Washington Williams: A Biography.

Frederick Law Olmsted, the northerner who wrote comprehensively about his travels in the South, had no southern counterpart. But there were thousands of southerners -- planters, merchants, bankers, students, housewives, writers, and politicians -- who traveled extensively in the North and who recorded their impressions in letters to their families, in articles for the local press, and in the few books they wrote.

In A Southern Odyssey the distinguished historian John Hope Franklin canvasses the entire field of southern travel and analyzes the travelers and their accounts of what they saw in the North. Many went out of sheer curiosity. Others went on business, to get an education, to make purchases for the store and home, to attend religious or political conventions, or to instruct northerners about the superior qualities of the southern way of life and warn them of the dangers of unbridled abolitionist attacks.

The more they went, the more they doubted the wisdom of spending money among their enemies. But they continued to go, even against their own advice to fellow southerners, and some tarried until the attack on Fort Sumter.

Concentrating as it does on the human side of North-South relations during the antebellum years, A Southern Odyssey represents a fresh and imaginative approach to a long overlooked chapter in southern history. It is also a handsome book, with twenty illustrations that comprise "An Album of Southern Travel."

First published in 1896, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade remains the standard work on the efforts made in the United States, from 1638 to 1870, to limit and suppress the trade in slaves between Africa and America. In the foreword to this new edition, John Hope Franklin, James B. Duke Professor of History Emeritus, and professor of legal history at Duke University, explains the attitude toward slavery at the time Du Bois wrote his book, gives a brief background of Du Bois's growth as an educator and writer, and examines the methods Du Bois used to write the book. Those doing work on th subject of American slavery will find this volume an important source book.

In George Washington Williams, John Hope Franklin reconstructs the life of the controversial, self-made black intellectual who wrote the first history of African Americans in the United States. Awarded the Clarence L. Holte Literary Prize, this book traces Franklin's forty-year quest for Williams's story, a story largely lost to history until this volume was first published in 1985. The result, part biography and part social history, is a unique consideration of a pioneering historian by his most distinguished successor. Williams, who lived from 1849 to 1891, had a remarkable career as soldier, minister, journalist, lawyer, politician, freelance diplomat, and African traveler, as well as a historian. While Franklin reveals the accomplishments of this neglected figure and emphasizes the racism that curtailed Williams's many talents, he also highlights the personal weaknesses that damaged Williams's relationships and career. Williams led the way in presenting African American history accurately through the use of oral history and archival research, sought to legitimize it as a field of historical study, and spoke out in support of an American Negro Historical Society and as a critic of European imperialism in Africa. He also became erratic and faithless to his family and creditors and died at the age of forty-one, destitute and alienated from family and friends. George Washington Williams is nothing less than a classic biography of a brilliant though flawed individual whose History of the Negro Race in America remains a landmark in African American history and American intellectual history.