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Read Reviews
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“Gail Shaffer Blankenau’s remarkable historical detective work transforms the little-known story of Celia and Eliza Grayson’s escape from enslavement in the newly organized Nebraska Territory into a broader story that goes to the heart of the national debate over the westward expansion of slavery on the eve of the Civil War. The experiences of the Grayson sisters, and the Nuckolls family who enslaved them, illuminate the malleability of slavery in borderland locations and the high stakes involved in transplanting it in western soil.”
Diane Mutti Burke author of On Slavery's Border: Missouri's Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865 and co-editor of Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border.
“Today, few outside Nebraska remember its role in the sectional crisis, and even fewer know about slavery’s existence in the territory. Blankenau’s intricate retelling of bondage and freedom in Nebraska City and its environs - through the lens of Celia and Eliza’s lives—corrects that oversight.”
Kristen Epps, author of Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras
"A thorough, revelatory account that demolishes the myth of Nebraska as free of slavery. This stirring history shows how Eliza and Celia Grayson's daring escape from bondage in Nebraska distilled the national debate over slavery to its very essence."
William G. Thomas III, author of A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War
“This deeply researched narrative brings to life the story of two courageous women who fled enslavement and gained freedom. With true sympathy, Gail Blankenau tells a very human story about the reach of slavery, and resistance to it, in Nebraska Territory.”
Lauret Savoy, author of Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape