Slavery's Borderland

"[This book] is engagingly written, the individual stories are compelling, and Salafia weaves them all together to give readers a real sense of time and place. Slavery's Borderland deserves a wide readership for it offers much insight into how racism became embedded in American culture."—American Historical Review

"Rather than seeing the Ohio River as a flowing borderline separating slavery from freedom, Salafia's work revises historians' well-worn assumptions to explore how cross-river connections sustained a region economically and-at least among whites-socially during the first half of the nineteenth century. . . . How long will it be before we have a reconsideration of the entire borderland between slavery and freedom from the colonial period to the post-Civil War era? Salafia's book has given the field an approach-and a regional start-for how that work might be done best."—Journal of the Early Republic

"Slavery's Borderland directs our attention from states defined by arbitrary political borders to fluid regions defined by networks of people interacting within a shared landscape. Avoiding the usual tendency to emphasize differences between slave Kentucky and free Ohio and Indiana, Matthew Salafia shows systems of labor evolving along a continuum that straddled the Ohio River. A fresh and long overdue perspective."—Andrew Cayton, Miami University

"Matthew Salafia brings the growing literature on the variety within American slavery and the 'many Souths' into conversation with the rich literature on the Old Northwest, and adds to all of these the uniqueness of slavery in the Ohio valley and its relationship with servitude across the river. By placing the river at the center, Slavery's Borderland transcends not only state histories but also regional histories."—Matthew Mason, Brigham Young University