What was it like for a mother to flee slavery, leaving her children behind? To Free a Family tells the remarkable story of Mary Walker, who in August 1848 fled

In the antebellum South, the presence of free people of color was problematic to the white population. Not only were they possible assistants to enslaved people

US families have been pushed to the wall. At the bottom of the economic ladder, poor and working-class adults aren't forming stable relationships and can't give

"A remarkably fine work of creative scholarship." —C. Vann Woodward, New York Review of Books In 1860, when four million African Americans were enslaved, a qu