Meticulously researched, this book documents the real stories of white and black activists who risked their lives in a concerted effort to help thousands of brave fugitive slaves race from bondage to claim their freedom.  By R.C. Smedley.  Paperback, 407 pages.

Celebrated for her courageous exploits as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman has entered history as one of nineteenth-century America's most enduring and important figures.  But just who was this remarkable woman?  By Catherine Clinton.  Paperback, 272 pages.

An African-American woman's Civil War memoir.  Near the end of her classic wartime account, Susie King Taylor writes, "there are many people who do not know what some of the colored women did during the war."  For her own part, Taylor spent four years--without pay or formal training--nursing sick and wounded members of a black regiment of Union soldiers.  Taylor tells of being born into slavery and of learning, in secret, to read and write.  She describes maturing under her wartime responsibilities and travelling with the troops in South Carolina, Georgia,

The Diary of Patsy, a Freed Girl in Mars Bluff, South Carolina, 1865. By Joyce Hansen. Hardcover, 213 pages.

This book includes representative selections from the speeches and writings of Frederick Douglass, with topics focusing on the slave trade, the Civil War, suffrage for African-Americans, reconstruction in the South, and other vital issues. A powerful voice for human rights throughout much of the nineteenth century, Douglass remains highly respected today for his fight against racial injustice.  By Frederick Douglass, edited by Philip S. Foner.  Paperback, 69 pages.

Israel on the Appomattox: a Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1700s through the Civil War. By Melvin Patrick Ely tells the story of these liberated blacks and the community they formed, called Israel Hill, in Prince Edward County, Virginia. There, ex-slaves established farms, navigated the Appomattox River, and became entrepreneurs. Free blacks and whites did business with one another, sued each other, worked side by side for equal wages, joined forces to found a Baptist congregation, moved west together, and occasionally settled down as man and wife.