Why read In Search of Canaan?

Book cover of In Search of Canaan: Black Migration to Kansas, 1879-80

Book description

Word spread across the southern farm country, and into the minds of those who labored over cotton or sugar crops, that the day of reckoning was near at hand, that the Lord had answered black prayers with the offer of deliverance in a western Eden. In this vast state where…

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American history

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Why read it?

1 author picked In Search of Canaan as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Charlotte Hinger

Author

Talk about primary sources! Do any exist that Athearn didn’t manage to locate? Not only is his writing highly readable, he includes details that can only be acquired through rigorous scholarship. In Search of Canann, explores the reasons for black people’s mass migration from Kansas. The South was suddenly deprived of workers. Due to the highly political atmosphere, the Senate organized a committee to investigate the “pell-mell land rush to Kansas, an unreasoned almost mindless exodus toward some vague ideal, some western paradise, where all cares would vanish.”

From Charlotte's list on The best books about African Americans in the West after the Civil War.