Early in his life, Hardin knew he was born a free person of color, and by the time he was twenty, he knew he had a more comprehensive education than most of the

"An enthralling work that will be essential reading for years to come." —David Nicholson, Washington Post A landmark history of African Americans in the West,

Until recently, histories of the American West gave little evidence of the presence--let alone importance--of African Americans in the unfolding of the western

The untold saga of John Randolph’s 383 slaves, freed in his much-contested will of 1821, finally comes to light. Few legal cases in American history are as ri

Today most Americans, black and white, identify slavery with cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the beginning of the nineteenth cen