Mary Walker was a fair-skinned fugitive slave woman who had escaped bondage in 1848, leaving her children and mother behind. Her moving story is documented in “To Free a Family,” by Sydney Nathans.
Author: Sydney Nathans
Dr. Nathans concentrates on the U.S. social and political history in the 19th century. He is the author of Daniel Webster and Jacksonian Democracy, is general editor of The Way We Lived in North Carolina, a five-volume series on the social history of North Carolina from settlement to the 20th century, and is the author of a book in the series, The Quest for Progress, 1870-1920. He has received fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations and has won the James Harvey Robinson Award of the American Historical Association. In 1988-89 he was Charles Warren Visiting Associate Professor of History at Harvard. His current research explores the history of the black rural settlement in the South, from 1770 to 1970, through an examination of three kindred communities that began as plantations in the antebellum era.