Running from Bondage

Karen Cook Bell is Associate Professor of History at Bowie State University. She is the author of Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia, which won the Georgia Board of Regents Excellence in Research Award. She specializes in the studies of slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and women's history.

• Introduction: Enslaved women's fugitivity; 1. 'A negro wench named Lucia': Enslaved women during the eighteenth century; 2. 'A mulatto woman named Margaret': Pre-Revolutionary fugitive women; 3. 'A well-dressed woman named Jenny': Revolutionary Black women, 1776–1781; 4. 'A negro woman called Bett': Overcoming obstacles to freedom in Post-Revolutionary America; 5. Confronting the power structures: Marronage and Black women's fugitivity; Conclusion.

'Karen Cook Bell's research brilliantly shows that the phenomenon of Black female flight in the period of slavery was not idiosyncratic but was, in fact, pervasive. This pathbreaking and beautifully written work centers the voices of Black women in slavery and abolition. A must-read.' Anne C. Bailey, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, History Department, and Director of the Harriet Tubman Center for the Study of Freedom and Equity, Binghamton University