February 10, 2006
Evangelical Religion, Liberalism,
and Antislavery
WHEN STUDENTS AND FACULTY at Calvin College in Grand Rapids protested the
invitation of President George W. Bush to speak at commencement in 2005, it
made national news. This wasn’t Harvard or Columbia, but an evangelical
institition supported by the Christian Reformed Church—the president’s supposed
home turf, at least spiritually speaking. After all, weren’t evangelicals the
shock troops of the Radical Right?
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and Antislavery"
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January 14, 2006
John Brown’s Subterranean Pass-Way
JOHN BROWN believed that God himself had ordained him to bring an end to slavery. Achieving his goal hinged on a radical and deeply secret scheme: the establishment of an “Underground Pass-Way” that would extend the Underground Railroad more than a thousand miles southward through the Appalachian Mountains into the heart of the Deep South. This highway to freedom would drain the South of slaves, Brown believed; they would travel north to the free states protected by strongholds manned by armed abolitionists and freed slaves. Few abolitionists knew what Brown really had in mind. Brown’s dreams ended in the debacle at Harper’s Ferry.
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July 28, 2005
The Underground Railroad
in the New York Hudson Valley
WE KNOW the Hudson Valley was one of the main arteries of the Underground Railroad.
We know that large numbers of fugitives were sent from Philadelphia to New York City, and up through the valley to Albany and Troy. Between 1842 and 1843—fugitives—virtually all, probably, from New York City. Most of them were sent onward to Central New York, Vermont, or Massachusetts.
But there is almost no record of how they traveled. Compared to other areas—for example, Central New York State, southern Pennsylvania, the Ohio River Valley, Detroit—the absence of records is deeply puzzling.
How did they travel? What routes did they follow? And who helped them?
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in the New York Hudson Valley"
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July 27, 2005
The Underground Railroad:
Myth & Reality
THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD occupies a romantic place in the American imagination that is shared by few other episodes in the country’s history. The term is so instantly recognizable that today it is automatically applied to clandestine routes of travel almost everywhere, whether we're talking about downed Allied airmen escaping from Nazi-held France, or North Korean refugees trying to make their way to China or Japan.
The Underground Railroad has bred mythology like no other phenomenon in American history. People in almost any town in the Northern states have heard about some old house, or tunnel, or hidey-hole in which fugitive slaves were supposedly sheltered.
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Myth & Reality"
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