Shining Light On The Underground Railroad « The Dish

Interesting to see how the historical interpretation has changed over the years, and how recent research essentially changes the simpler narratives for a more complex and varied narrative involving both whites and blacks:

In a review of Eric Foner’s new history of the Underground Railroad, Gateway to Freedom, Jennifer Schuessler reflects on the various ways scholars have understood the way slaves escaped north to freedom:

The first scholarly study of the Underground Railroad, published by Wilbur Siebert in 1898, named some 3,200 “agents,” virtually all of them white men, who presided over an elaborate network of fixed routes, illustrated with maps that looked much like those of an ordinary railroad. That view largely held among scholars until 1961, when the historian Larry Gara published “The Liberty Line,” a slashing revisionist study that dismissed the Underground Railroad as a myth and argued that most fugitive slaves escaped at their own initiative, with little help from organized abolitionists. Scholarship on the topic all but dried up, as historians more generally emphasized the agency of African-Americans in claiming their own freedom.

But over the past 15 years, aided by newly digitized records of obscure abolitionist newspapers and local archives, scholars have constructed a new picture of the Underground Railroad as a collection of loosely interlocking local networks of activists, both black and white, that waxed and waned over time but nevertheless helped a significant number reach freedom.

Shining Light On The Underground Railroad « The Dish.