Defining Documents in American History: The Underground Railroad Reviews

Wednesday, July 15, 2026 11:43:43 PM
"This two-volume entry in Salem Press’s long-running Defining Documents series opens not with statute or speech but with narrative voice: its first section gathers slave narratives and freedom songs—from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to “Follow the Drinking Gourd”—establishing the human stakes before the documentary record proper even begins. Editor Michael Shally-Jensen builds the remaining five sections chronologically, moving from the legal “Beginnings” of slavery and abolition in British North America, through the 1800s’ escalating contest between fugitive-slave law and abolitionist resistance, to Reconstruction and Jim Crow. The volume’s final sections, “The Underground Railroad Above Ground” and “Contemporary Parallels,” extend the network’s legacy into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, pairing the dedication of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and the 2021 Juneteenth National Independence Day Act with documents on Black Lives Matter, the Ferguson unrest, and contemporary human trafficking legislation. This is a deliberate argument that the Underground Railroad’s afterlife runs through Reconstruction-era violence and into the present.

Sources are wide-ranging and well chosen: court decisions (Prigg v. Pennsylvania, Dred Scott, Plessy), legislative acts (the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, the Reconstruction-era Civil Rights Acts), newspaper editorials, and firsthand accounts sit alongside maps, fugitive-slave advertisements, and ephemera such as the 2024 USPS Underground Railroad postage-stamp series.

As with other titles in this series, each document is paired with a critical essay that models close reading for student researchers and closes with a bibliography for further reading. An appendix profiling allies and conductors of the railroad, a chronological list of documents, web resources, a general bibliography, and an index round out the set.

This volume is recommended for high school, public, and academic libraries seeking an accessible, well-annotated entry point into primary sources on the Underground Railroad and its long afterlife in American social movements."

-RUSA (Reference and User Services Association), July 2026