Photography by Thai NguyenDr. Richard Bell is a scholar, writer, and teacher at the University of Maryland, where he is an associate professor. His research focuses on the history and culture of the United States between 1750 and 1877. His new book, Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home, was published by Simon & Schuster on October 15, 2019. Stolen is the true story of 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. In Philadelphia in 1825, these five young, free black boys fell 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 were instead met with blindfolds, ropes, and knives. Over four long months, their kidnappers drove them overland into the Cotton Kingdom to be sold as slaves. Determined to resist, the boys formed a tight brotherhood as they struggled to free themselves and find their way home. Their ordeal—an odyssey that took 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.

You can read more on his website or reach out to him here.

Read Richard's books: 

Some Highlights: 

Rick's background, from Britain but captivated by America

Previous books and how a mysterious suicide led to research to "Stolen"

Switching from Academic audience to popular audience

1825 - Philadelphia

Freedom and kidnappings in Philadelphia

Domestic internal slave trade - 1 million people between 1770-1860

"Boy Lost"

Where do you go once you escape?

The Reverse Underground Railroad

Cornelius Sinclair, his parents, and the loss of a child

Professional Kidnappers and Legal slave traders

Capillaries of a domestic Middle Passage

Coffles - caravans across the United States of enslaved people

The strengths of the microhistorical approach

Thomas Foster - Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men (Gender and Slavery Ser.)

Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World

Twelve Years a Slave 

Walter Johnson - River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom

Ed Baptist - The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

Suggestions:

Rick: Check out the following micro-history:

Adam Rothman - Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery

Paul Johnson - The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America

Donna Merrick - Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York

Steven: Visit public history sites to think critically ab...