On the night of November 7,1841, the Creole was transporting slaves from Richmond, Virginia, to the auction block at New Orleans. A band of slaves led by Marion Washington seized the crew and its captain. Over the next several days they forced the Creole to sail into Nassua harbor, where the British authorities offered freedom to the slaves aboard, touching off a diplomatic squabble and continuing legal ramifications.

Thousands of black people sought refuge in Canada before the U.S. Civil War. While most refugees encountered at least some racism among Canadian citizens, many of those same refugees also thrived under the auspices of the Canadian government, which worked to protect blacks from the U.S. slaveowners who sought to re-enslave them. This work brings to light the life stories of several nineteenth-century black refugees who managed to survive in their new country by gaining work as barbers, postal carriers, washerwomen, waiters, cab owners, ministers, newspaper editors, and physicians. The book begins with a short historical account of blacks in Canada from 1629 until the early 1800s, when the first groups of escaped slaves began to enter the country.

In the winter of 1914, Carl Sandburg, then a reporter at The Day Book in Chicago, submitted several of his poems to Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine. The title poem began: "Hog Butcher for the World, / Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat..." Monroe at first hesitated to accept the poems because of "their unorthodox form and their range from brutality to misty lyricism." But she took a deep breath and printed them. In the decade that followed, Sandburg came quickly to national prominence. In Poems for the People, George and Wilene Hendrick, Sandburg's most accomplished interpreters, have selected seventy-three poems from his early years in Chicago, almost all of them never before in print. Included are poems of social protest, gentle ruminations, and poems about teeming Chicago life. Sandburg may have regarded them as too radical for the time; others may have been set aside and never retrieved. This unearthed treasure, together with the Hendrick's biographical introduction and commentary on the poems, mark Poems for the People as a major publishing event.

Published to coincide with Black History Month and the opening of the new Underground Railroad Museum in Cincinnati, Fleeing for Freedom includes selected narratives from the two most important contemporary chroniclers of the Underground Railroad, Levi Coffin and William Still. Here are firsthand descriptions of the experiences of escaped slaves making their way to freedom in the North and in Canada in the years before the Civil War. George and Willene Hendrick have chosen a broad range of stories to reflect the strategies, tactics, heartbreak, and dangers for both the slaves and the "conductors" of the secret network. In their Introduction, they provide basic information about the scope and workings of the Underground Railroad and its impact on slaves, slaveholders, and the Northern abolitionist societies that were so heavily involved. Fleeing for Freedom offers gripping personal accounts of one of the great collaborations between whites and blacks in American history. With 15 black-and-white engravings and line drawings."

Henry Salt abandoned his mastership at Eton in the 1880s to devote himself to causes including vegetarianism, socialism, animals' rights, conservation and prison reform. In 1890 he published the initial version of Thoreau's "Life". With the help of American friends, he revised the book and published it anew in 1896. This third version is Salt's final reading of Thoreau based on works published up to 1908, including Thoreau's complete "Journal". Combining a narrative of Thoreau's life with a treatment of his ideas and writings, it is a penetrating study of Thoreau, which stresses his distinctive individuality. Through analysis of the text and a concise biography, the editors illustrate Salt's growth as a scholar and his changing views on Thoreau and Thoreau's philosophy. The introduction details Salt's stylistic improvements to the 1908 edition as well as the inclusion of anecdotes and facts gathered from Samuel Arthur Jones, F.B. Sanborn, Ernest W. Vickers, Raymond Adams, Fred Hosmer and Gandhi. This book is suitable for scholars of Thoreau and readers interested in Thoreau, American Transcendentalism or American literature.

M. K. Gandhi came to fame in the twentieth century for his nonviolent efforts to free India from British rule. Gandhi, though, perfected his civil disobedience method during his two decades (1893-1914) in South Africa. M. K. Gandhi's First Nonviolent Campaign: A Study of Racism in South Africa and the United States shows Gandhi, son of a prime minister of two princely estates in India, a graduate in law from the Inner Temple in London, facing racism in South Africa. He was called a coolie, denied first class railroad accommodations, physically attacked, and subjected to an attempted lynching. The racism he faced was similar to the racism in the United States at the same time. Gandhi's development as a leader against racism in South Africa was a slow process, and his devotion to the cause created stress in his marriage and in his family life. Gandhi's years in South Africa are still too little understood. George and Willene Hendrick use the vast published resources of Gandhi scholarship and the equally large accounts of racism in the lives of Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others, opening up new ways to interpret Gandhi. They discuss Gandhi's successes and failures, his foibles, and his engaging human qualities. His developing belief in religious toleration is a recurring theme in this study. George and Willene Hendrick in this critical study explore major influences on Gandhi's nonviolent method and his major contribution to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They emphasize Gandhi's opposition to racism and show parallels to racism in the United States. M. K. Gandhi's First Nonviolent Campaign will appeal to those who wish to read about Gandhi's life, to students of racism in South Africa and the American South, and to readers studying African-American literature and culture.