HighBridge Audio

Skip to Main Content »

Category Navigation:

Search Site
 

Gateway to Freedom

Audiobook
Nonfiction: History
Unabridged   9 hour(s)
Publication date: 01/19/2015

Gateway to Freedom

Available from major retailers or BUY FROM AMAZON
Audio CD ISBN:9781622315901
Digital Download ISBN:9781622315918

Summary

The dramatic story of fugitive slaves and the antislavery activists who defied the law to help them reach freedom.

Be the first to review this product
Email to a Friend


Product Description

The dramatic story of fugitive slaves and the antislavery activists who defied the law to help them reach freedom.

They are little known to history: Sydney Howard Gay, an abolitionist newspaper editor; Louis Napoleon, a furniture polisher; Charles B. Ray, a black minister. At great risk they operated the underground railroad in New York, a city whose businesses, banks, and politics were deeply enmeshed in the slave economy. In secret coordination with black dockworkers who alerted them to the arrival of fugitives and with counterparts in Norfolk, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Albany, and Syracuse, underground-railroad operatives in New York helped more than 3,000 fugitive slaves reach freedom between 1830 and 1860. Their defiance of the notorious Fugitive Slave Law inflamed the South. White and black, educated and illiterate, they were heroic figures in the ongoing struggle between slavery and freedom.

Making brilliant use of fresh evidence-including the meticulous record of slave rescues secretly kept by Gay-Eric Foner elevates the underground railroad from folklore to sweeping history.

Author Bio

Eric Foner is the preeminent historian of his generation, highly respected by historians of every stripewhether they specialize in political history or social history. His books have won the top awards in the profession, and he has been president of both major history organizations: the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. He has worked on every detail of Give Me Liberty!, which displays all of his trademark strengths as a scholar, teacher, and writer. A specialist on the Civil War/Reconstruction period, he regularly teaches the nineteenth-century survey at Columbia University, where he is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History. Erics most recent book was a Norton trade book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, which won the Pulitzer, Lincoln, and Bancroft prizes.