Volume 39, Number 3 · January 30, 1992
Life and Death in Slavery
By David Brion Davis
Celia: A Slave
by Melton A. McLaurin
University of Georgia Press, 148 pp., $19.95
Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North
by Thomas P. Slaughter
Oxford University Press, 252 pp., $29.95
On occasion, as with the two excellent books under review, a gifted historian may discover a remarkable story about ordinary people that illuminates the laws, themes, and disputes of history. This interplay between private lives and public events enables the reader, who knows in retrospect how the official scroll of time will unfold, to recapture the contingency of the past, to enter a world when, for example, no one could predict how long the Fugitive Slave Law would be in effect or know whether Kansas would become the next slave state.
Review, 4594 words
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