Book and Journal Reviews

Gregory Wigmore, doctoral candidate at University of California at Davis, looks at how slaves of British Loyalists traversed both boundaries of nation-state and enslavement to secure manumission.  Wigmore begins his essay with a slave woman and her son escaping enslavement from an attorney in Upper Canada.  Similar to the process and dynamic of Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad, the mother and son board a small boat and flee Sandwich by way of the Detroit River to Detroit.  His compelling introduction, illuminates slave negotiation of the borderlands in order to attain freedom.  Wigmore situates his historical characters and many others in the greater historiography of slavery by suggesting their absence from the historical narrative and asserts that runaway slaves “played a significant role in the hardening of that boundary.” (p.438) Wigmore claims historians have traditionally looked at slave flight from the U.S. to Canada not the reverse.  Continue reading →

The September 2011 Special Issue (98:2) of the Journal of American History placed its focus on borderlands history with a collective title–“Margins to Mainstream: The Brave New World of Borderlands History.” It featured six articles:  Continue reading →