A letter that helped to convict a Nazi war criminal… A squeegee handle that saved the lives of half a dozen people on 9/11… A set of stairs that saved hundreds more… These ordinary objects played a role in some extraordinary stories. These stories are also some...
Frederick Douglass, the famed orator and abolitionist, saw his life change in one afternoon in 1833. Learn about his incredible battle with an overseer--a struggle that changed a slave into a man, he said. Click on the link below, and you can watch our second "History...
Happy Henry Day! This week marks the 166th anniversary of Henry Brown's amazing escape from slavery. On March 23, 1849, Henry Brown was sealed inside a wooden box, 3 feet by 2 feet by 2-1/2 feet in size. Then he was shipped from Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia--a...
Ellen's teeth chattered, and she pulled the thin blanket around her shoulders. She was cold, and she was terrified. In the dim glow of a single candle, she sat on a stool and watched her husband William emerge from the darkness with a pair of scissors in his right...
Sojourner Truth was once told that if she dared to preach, the building where she spoke would be burned. The famous abolitionist responded, "Then I will speak to the ashes." You gotta love it. This past weekend, actress Jennifer Goran and I encountered Sojourner Truth...
I am thrilled to announce that a New York film and television company has purchased the screenplay of The Disappearing Man, with the goal of bringing Henry "Box" Brown's story to the screen. Many people have told me that my novels read like movies, so it is only...
When I did a presentation at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati last fall, one of the people at the museum said jokingly, "The women here were wondering if the man on the cover of my novel, The Disappearing Man, was going to come along...
Bay Forest Books released a new book trailer for The Vanishing Woman, produced by Stan Severance. Check it out:Â http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uai2yECAxCc The opening lines of the trailer say, "Eliza called her father 'Papa'. Her half-sister, Ellen, called him...
Jennifer Goran, a Champaign actress, did her first presentation this past week as Ellen Craft, the slave who escaped in 1848 by posing as a white man. Jennifer did a marvelous job bringing Ellen and her story to life for seventh and eighth grade students in Champaign,...
Take a good look at the two women pictured here. They were half-sisters, but they lived in two entirely different worlds. One was the other's slave. Ellen and Eliza had the same father, Major James P. Smith of Clinton, Georgia, but they had different mothers, and this...