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Baltimore's African-American population--nearly 27,000 strong and more than 90 percent free in 1860--was the largest in the nation at that time. Christopher Phillips's Freedom's Port, the first book-length study of an urban black population in the antebellum Upper South, chronicles the growth and development of that community. He shows how it grew from a transient aggregate of individuals, many fresh from slavery, to a strong, overwhelmingly free community less wracked by class and intraracial divisions than were other cities. Almost from the start, Phillips states, Baltimore's African Americans forged their own freedom and actively defended it--in a state that maintained slavery and whose white leadership came to resent the liberties the city's black people had achieved.
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"The most complete and intensiveanalysis of what [Lewis defines as the Cold War or what might be described as the inquisitionalonslaught by federal and state 'un-American' committees on the integrity and independence of theAmerican professorate during 1946-56." -Edward C. McDonagh, The American Journal ofEducation "Lewis's work reinforces a fundamental point.Administrators at over one hundred institutions share responsibility for actions that helpedstrike a tragic blow to academic freedom and intellectual culture during the 1950s. They wereparticipants in a campaign of political expedience and aggression-along with thousands ofnational leaders." -David R. Homes, Journal of HigherEducation
Before the Civil War, George Proctor Kane had been a businessman, thespian, political appointee, philanthropist and militiaman. During the war, as Baltimore's chief of police, he harbored the divided loyalties familiar to the border states--Southern in his sentiments yet Northern in his allegiances. As the city's top lawman, he sought to reform Baltimore's "Mobtown" image. He ensured that President-elect Lincoln, passing through on the way to his inauguration, was not assassinated. He protected Union troops marching to defend Washington, D.C. He was eventually imprisoned as a Southern sympathizer, denied habeas corpus as his captors transferred him from prison to prison. This book recounts Kane's enigmatic public life before and during the Civil War, his Confederate activities after prison and his return to serve as mayor of Baltimore.
Freedom's Mirage traces the exceptional life of Virgil Bennehan, born in bondage in 1808 in Piedmont North Carolina, who rose to become an enslaved doctor on one of the South's largest plantations and to view himself as a friend to Black and white people alike. Emancipated in 1848 but required to leave the state to be free, he was sent to Liberia. Though richly endowed and royally welcomed, he found himself subject to new rulers and mired in the worst medical catastrophe in Liberian history. Recrossing the Atlantic, he boldly returned to North Carolina to warn slave owners that Liberia was a death trap. Yet again exiled from his native state, he declared in March 1849 his intention to go to gold rush California, the one place at midcentury that seemed to offer an open field, even to a man of color. Intrepidly researched and grippingly told, Virgil Bennehan's story reveals the complexity and fragility of human relationships within bondage. Once liberated, Bennehan led a tumultuous life that dramatized the fleeting promise and pervasive limits of Black freedom in the era of slavery—and foreshadowed the future for generations that followed.