Meadows reviews Scott & Hébrard, Nathans, Auslander, on "Race, Family, and Law in the Struggle for Freedom"

Common-place has just released a special issue, edited by Megan Kate Nelson and Kevin Levin, on "The Civil War at 150: Memory and Meaning." Of particular interest to LHB readers is an essay by R. Darrell Meadows, titled "The (Not So) Distant Kinship of Race, Family, and Law in the Struggle for Freedom." Meadows (Kentucky Historical Society) reviews Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Harvard University Press, 2012); Sydney Nathans, To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker (Harvard University Press, 2012); and  Mark Auslander, The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family (University of Georgia Press, 2011). "Each of these works," writes Meadows, "complicate our often overly generalized understandings of how individuals and groups navigated the complex and frequently porous boundaries of family, race, and class in the pursuit of freedom." Read on here.