Timothy D Walker on “Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad”

In 1858, Mary Millburn successfully made her escape from Norfolk, Virginia, to Philadelphia aboard an express steamship. Millburn’s maritime route to freedom was far from uncommon. By the mid-nineteenth century an increasing number of enslaved people had fled northward along the Atlantic seaboard. While scholarship on the Underground Railroad has focused almost exclusively on overland escape routes from the antebellum South, this groundbreaking volume expands our understanding of how freedom was achieved by sea and what the journey looked like for many African Americans.

With innovative scholarship and thorough research, Sailing to Freedom highlights little-known stories and describes the less-understood maritime side of the Underground Railroad, including the impact of African Americans’ paid and unpaid waterfront labor. These ten essays reconsider and contextualize how escapes were managed along the East Coast, moving from the Carolinas, Virginia, and Maryland to safe harbor in northern cities such as Philadelphia, New York, New Bedford, and Boston.

Dr. Timothy Walker is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and serves as Fulbright Program Advisor. He is a member of the graduate faculty of the Department of Portuguese and an affiliated faculty member of the Center of Indian Studies and the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. Walker is also an Affiliated Researcher of the Centro de História de Além-Mar (CHAM) at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. In September 2018 he was appointed Guest Investigator at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Dr. Walker’s teaching fields include Early Modern Europe, the Atlantic World, the Portuguese and their empire, maritime history and European global colonial expansion. Current research topics include the adoption of colonial indigenous medicines by Europeans; climate data derived from colonial-era archival documentation; slave trading in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans; as well as commercial and cultural links between the Portuguese overseas colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

Allison M. Johnson on “The Left-Armed Corps: Writings by Amputee Civil War Veterans”

The Left-Armed Corps collects and annotates a unique and little-known body of Civil War literature: narrative sketches, accounts, and poetry by veterans who lost the use of their right arms due to wounds sustained during the conflict and who later competed in left-handed penmanship contests in 1865 and 1866.

Organized by William Oland Bourne, the contests called on men who lost limbs while fighting for the Union to submit “specimens” of their best left-handed “business” writing in the form of personal statements. Bourne hoped the contests would help veterans reenter the work force and become economically viable citizens. Following Bourne’s aims, the contests commemorated the sacrifices made by veterans and created an archive of individual stories detailing the recently ended conflict. The Left-Armed Corps makes accessible this archive of powerful testimony and creative expression from Americans who fought to preserve the Union and end slavery.

Allison M. Johnson is assistant professor of English at San José State University. A Southern California native, she double majored in English and History at UC Riverside before earning her M.A. and Ph.D. in English at UCLA. She is the author of The Scars We Carve: Bodies and Wounds in Civil War Print Culture and the coeditor of Religion and Its Reformation in America, Beginnings to 1730: An Anthology of Primary Sources.