Reprint of the original, first published in 1873.

"Life and Adventures of James Williams, a Fugitive Slave" is a 1873 account by American slave James Williams, describing his early life, abuse, and eventual escape to New York City. The first slave narrative published by the American Anti-Slavery Society, today the story is commonly remembered as fraudulent due to contemporary Southern newspaper columnists' attacks on the narrative's veracity. The book was ghostwritten by John Greenleaf Whittier, a Quaker poet and abolitionist. Contents include: "An Introductory Excerpt by W. Mckinstry", "Preface", "When and Where Born", "Why I Ran Away", "First Contact with the Underground Railroad", "In the Riot Against the Killers", "Escape from Pursuers", "Raffling for Geese, and What Came of it", "Making Coffee out of Salt Water", etc. A powerful account of life as an African-American slave that will appeal to those interested in black history and literature. Read & Co. History is proudly republishing this classic slave narrative now in a brand new edition, complete with an introductory excerpt by W. Mckinstry.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

‘Flannery has done us a service first by reissuing the story of a fascinating adventure from 200 years ago, and then by setting these events in perspective with his lucid introduction.’ Canberra Times ‘At 2.00 pm on Sunday, 6 July 1835, a giant of a man shambled into the camp left by John Batman at Indented Head near Geelong...’ In 1803 the convict William Buckley, a former soldier, escaped from the first official settlement in Victoria, near Sorrento on Port Phillip Bay. For three decades the ‘wild white man’ lived with Aborigines around the bay, before giving himself up in 1835. First published in 1852, The Life and Adventures of William Buckley is the ultimate survival story of early Australia and provides an extraordinary insight into pre-contact indigenous society. Tim Flannery has published over thirty books, including the award-winning The Future Eaters, The Weather Makers and Here on Earth and the novel The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish. In 2005 he was named Australian Humanist of the Year and in 2007 Australian of the Year. In 2007 he co-founded and was appointed Chair of the Copenhagen Climate Council. In 2011 he became Australia’s Chief Climate Commissioner, and in 2013 he founded the Australian Climate Council. ‘This account, in Buckley’s words...has all the elements of a Boy’s Own yarn: convicts, savages, privations, wars, cannibalism, survival, treachery and the founding of a colony.’ Herald Sun

Thousands of black cowpunchers drove cattle up the Chisholm Trail after the Civil War, but only Nat Love wrote about his experiences. Born to slaves in Davidson County, Tennessee, the newly freed Love struck out for Kansas after the war. He was fifteen and already endowed with a reckless and romantic readiness. In wide-open Dodge City he joined up with an outfit from the Texas Panhandle to begin a career riding the range and fighting Indians, outlaws, and the elements. Years later he would say, "I had an unusually adventurous life". That was rare understatement. More characteristic was Love's claim: "I carry the marks of fourteen bullet wounds on different parts of my body, most any one of which would be sufficient to kill an ordinary man, but I am not even crippled". In 1876 a virtuoso rodeo performance in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, won him the moniker of Deadwood Dick. He became known as DD all over the West, entering into dime novels as a mysteriously dark and heroic presence. This vivid autobiography includes encounters with Bat Masterson and Billy the Kid, a soon-after view of the Custer battlefield, and a successful courtship. Love left the range in 1890, the year of the official closing of the frontier. Then, as a Pullman train conductor he traveled his old trails, and those good times bring his story to a satisfying end.

The fascinating biography of one of America's little known heroes in its struggle for independence from England as fought in the Carolina backcountry.

Jesse Olsavsky’s The Most Absolute Abolition tells the dramatic story of how vigilance committees organized the Underground Railroad and revolutionized the abolitionist movement. These groups, based primarily in northeastern cities, defended Black neighborhoods from police and slave catchers. As the urban wing of the Underground Railroad, they helped as many as ten thousand refugees, building an elaborate network of like-minded sympathizers across boundaries of nation, gender, race, and class. Olsavsky reveals how the committees cultivated a movement of ideas animated by a motley assortment of agitators and intellectuals, including famous figures such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Henry David Thoreau, who shared critical information with one another. Formerly enslaved runaways—who grasped the economy of slavery, developed their own political imaginations, and communicated strategies of resistance to abolitionists—serve as the book’s central focus. The dialogues between fugitives and abolitionists further radicalized the latter’s tactics and inspired novel forms of feminism, prison reform, and utopian constructs. These notions transformed abolitionism into a revolutionary movement, one at the heart of the crises that culminated in the Civil War.