"Journey to Freedom provides the first detailed history of Black enslavement in Nebraska Territory and the escape of two enslaved Black women-Celia and Eliza Grayson-from Nebraska City in 1858 to debate whether slavery could exist in the West, and whether popular sovereignty truly worked"--

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.

"This collection of eleven essays examines nineteenth-century legal and extralegal attempts to restrict freedom of speech and the press as well as the efforts of others to push back against those restrictions"--

A provocative examination of literacy in the American South before emancipation, countering the long-standing stereotype of the South's oral tradition Schweiger complicates our understanding of literacy in the American South in the decades just prior to the Civil War by showing that rural people had access to a remarkable variety of things to read. Drawing on the writings of four young women who lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Schweiger shows how free and enslaved people learned to read, and that they wrote and spoke poems, songs, stories, and religious doctrines that were circulated by speech and in print. The assumption that slavery and reading are incompatible--which has its origins in the eighteenth century--has obscured the rich literate tradition at the heart of Southern and American culture.