cover image Freedom Roads: Searching for the Underground Railroad

Freedom Roads: Searching for the Underground Railroad

Joyce Hansen, Gary McGowan. Cricket Books, $18.95 (166pp) ISBN 978-0-8126-2673-5

The Underground Railroad and one woman's fight for equality are the subjects of two nonfiction volumes. Joyce Hansen and Gary McGowan explore the ways historians have traced the path of the enslaved as they traveled northward to freedom in Freedom Roads: Searching for the Underground Railroad. Opening with archeologists' discovery of Fort Mose, ""the first settlement of freed men and women in America,"" the authors demonstrate how the study of artifacts, laws, slave narratives and more contribute to an understanding of how this crucial chapter of American history evolved. Reproductions of period photographs and documents extend the value of this well-researched volume, and James Ransome's half-tone watercolor paintings open each chapter.