Reviews for The Underground Railroad on the Western Frontier: Escapes from Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa and the Territories of Kansas, Nebraska and the Indian Nations, 1840-1865

The average rating for The Underground Railroad on the Western Frontier: Escapes from Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa and the Territories of Kansas, Nebraska and the Indian Nations, 1840-1865 based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-05-27 00:00:00 Michael Feist The first I've read of Brown, but not the last I hope. He gets at the kinds of questions that draw me the most to history. How and why do certain practices or beliefs change from being acceptable to being seen as completely immoral? What triggers that kind of moral evolution? Brown also explores in depth the gap between belief and action, and uses the British abolitionist movement as a way to show how, even when many people believe something is wrong, most of the time they won't do anything to address it. Similarly, the abolition of slavery in Britain didn't come about as a natural, inevitable result of Enlightenment thought or Christian zeal. Brown shows that moral repugnance for slavery had existed for decades before any semblance of a movement against it was formed, and that the moral capital the movement's success brought Britain helped them justify their imperialist agenda through the nineteenth century.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-02-14 00:00:00 Marko Vizaniaris A deep dive into the foundations of the abolition of slavery as state-sanctioned trade policy, brilliantly supporting the author's own thesis that the emancipation of African slaves, far from being the inevitable result of cultural progress (e.g. growing public and media literacy, bourgeois humanitarianism, Christian revival movements) and economic progress (growing wealth, growth of free market trading and international competition, technology), the emancipation of slaves was actually the most radical form of abolition to have even been proposed by opponents of the slave trade prior to the American War of Independence and was the unlikely result of the institutional reforms driven by highly zealous elites (in addition to broader cultural and economic changes) This relatively impartial and comprehensively researched historiography explains how early transatlantic critiques of institutional slavery by a zealous global literary elite, buoyed by growing public awareness of severe human rights abuses, culminated in institutional reforms of politically-influential societies in America and Britain and, later, to volte-faces in American state and British trade policy - all catalysed by the moral paroxysms which brought on and resulted from the American war of independence of 1775-1783.