Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Traveling the Freedom Road

Linda Barrett Osborne ’71, Traveling the Freedom Road: From Slavery and the Civil War Through Reconstruction, Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2009. From the injustices of slavery, through the bloodshed of the Civil War, to the turbulence of Reconstruction, this book tells how children, teenagers, and their families survived those challenging times.

“Traveling the Freedom Road: From Slavery and the Civil War Through Reconstruction” by Linda B. Osborne has been published by the Library of Congress and Harry N. Abrams Inc. This book for young people draws on interviews in the Library of Congress collections with former slaves to convey the aspirations, sorrows, courage and hopes of ordinary people living through this period.

Osborne, a senior writer and editor in the Library’s Publishing Office, mined the Federal Writers’ Project slave narratives as well as materials in the Library’s Manuscript, Prints and Photographs, Rare Book and Special Collections, and Geography and Map divisions for this work that focuses on the experiences of African-American children.

More than 80 archival images complement the text. Major events covered include the rise of the domestic slave trade, the Emancipation Proclamation and the Republican Congress’s Reconstruction policies.

From Charles Cowley, an enslaved child who had no shoes to wear as he walked through the snow, to Richard Slaughter, who enlisted in the Union Army at 17, this book reveals the personal hardships and courageous endurance of black youth in 19th-century America.

This full-color hardback book is available for $24.95 from the Library of Congress Sales Shop and in bookstores nationwide.

Traveling the Freedom Road: From Slavery and the Civil War Through Reconstruction

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