Why read Stolen?

Book cover of Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home

Book description

This “superbly researched and engaging” (The Wall Street Journal) true story about 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 belongs “alongside the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edward P. Jones,…

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Why read it?

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

Joshua D. Rothman

Author

Because the buying and selling of enslaved people was enormously profitable and entirely legal in the United States before the Civil War, even free Black people lived in fear that they might be kidnapped, sold illegally as slaves, and never heard from by their friends and families again. Though many Americans are familiar with the experience of Solomon Northup, as relayed in his memoir Twelve Years a Slave and the film of the same name, Richard Bell demonstrates how kidnapping was widespread in the nineteenth century and how thin the line could be between freedom and slavery.

From Joshua's list on The best books from the last ten years on the domestic slave trade.