Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home

FAIN: FZ-256400-17

Richard J. Bell
University of Maryland, College Park (College Park, MD 20742-5141)

A book on four boys kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1825 and their story's impact on debates about slavery and abolition.

I would use NEH funding to support the completion of the final chapters of my new book. The Lost Boys: A Story of Slavery and Justice on the Reverse Underground Railroad is to be published by Simon & Schuster in late fall 2018. It tells the little-known story of the miraculous escape of four free black children from the clutches of post-revolutionary America’s most fearsome gang of kidnappers and enslavers. Designed to capitalize on the interest in human trafficking spurred by the Oscar-winning film Twelve Years a Slave (2013), The Lost Boys offers a revisionist account of the role of kidnapping in the domestic slave trade in the decades immediately following the American Revolution. It situates black persons at the center of analysis, up-ends simple racial and gender dichotomies, and argues that the kidnapping of free black people into slavery in this critical period was vastly more frequent, pernicious, and politically significant than we have previously supposed.

Associated Products

Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home (Book)
Title: Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home
Author: Richard Bell
Abstract: A gripping and true story about five boys who were kidnapped in the North and smuggled into slavery in the Deep South—and their daring attempt to escape and bring their captors to justice, reminiscent of Twelve Years A Slave and Never Caught. Philadelphia, 1825: five young, free black boys fall into the clutches of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the United States. Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, they are instead met with blindfolds, ropes, and knives. Over four long months, their kidnappers drive them overland into the Cotton Kingdom to be sold as slaves. Determined to resist, the boys form a tight brotherhood as they struggle to free themselves and find their way home. Their ordeal—an odyssey that takes them from the Philadelphia waterfront to the marshes of Mississippi and then onward still—shines a glaring spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad, a black market network of human traffickers and slave traders who stole away thousands of legally free African Americans from their families in order to fuel slavery’s rapid expansion in the decades before the Civil War. Impeccably researched and breathlessly paced, Stolen tells the incredible story of five boys whose courage forever changed the fight against slavery in America.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Stolen/Richard-Bell/9781501169434
Access Model: It's a book
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781501169434
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home (Book)
Title: Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home
Author: Richard Bell
Abstract: A gripping and true story about five boys who were kidnapped in the North and smuggled into slavery in the Deep South—and their daring attempt to escape and bring their captors to justice, reminiscent of Twelve Years A Slave and Never Caught. Philadelphia, 1825: five young, free black boys fall into the clutches of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the United States. Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, they are instead met with blindfolds, ropes, and knives. Over four long months, their kidnappers drive them overland into the Cotton Kingdom to be sold as slaves. Determined to resist, the boys form a tight brotherhood as they struggle to free themselves and find their way home. Their ordeal—an odyssey that takes them from the Philadelphia waterfront to the marshes of Mississippi and then onward still—shines a glaring spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad, a black market network of human traffickers and slave traders who stole away thousands of legally free African Americans from their families in order to fuel slavery’s rapid expansion in the decades before the Civil War. Impeccably researched and breathlessly paced, Stolen tells the incredible story of five boys whose courage forever changed the fight against slavery in America.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Stolen/Richard-Bell/9781501169434
Access Model: It's a book
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781501169434
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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