When:
Wednesday, January 17, 2024
12:30 PM | (UTC-04:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada) | 1 hour
IMPORTANT NOTICE: This WebEx service includes a feature that allows audio and any documents and other materials exchanged or viewed during the meeting to be recorded. By joining this meeting, you automatically consent to such recordings. If you do not consent to the recording, discuss your concerns with the meeting host prior to the start of the recording or do not join the meeting. Please note that any such recordings may be subject to discovery in the event of litigation.
Where:
Join from the meeting link:
https://usdeptoftheinteriorlibrary.my.webex.com/usdeptoftheinteriorlibrary.my/j.php?MTID=m3105cee2f3176c242f29ebc6f6a9ca02
Join by meeting number:
Meeting number (access code): 2552 488 3862
Meeting password: SupPYY3Mi89
Tap to join from a mobile device (attendees only)
+1-408-418-9388,,25524883862## USA Toll
Join by phone
+1-408-418-9388 USA Toll
Join by video system, application or Skype for business
Dial 25524883862@webex.com
You can also dial 173.243.2.68 and enter your meeting number.
Need help? Go to https://help.webex.com
The DOI Reads Book Club will again be meeting virtually on Wednesday, January 17, from 12:30 to 1:30 pm ET to discuss our next Book Club selection, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad by Eric Foner.
As always, all are welcome and you don't need to finish the book to join us. Just bring your questions, insights and thoughts about this book.
Advance RSVPs are very welcome, but all are encouraged to come regardless. To RSVP or for more information about the DOI Reads Book Club and other DOI Library programs and events, please contact the library staff via email (library@ios.doi.gov) or phone at 202-208-5815.
At the time of the program please join from the meeting link above to view the webinar. To join our audio via phone you will also need to dial into the Audio Connection, using the phone number listed. If prompted for an access code, please enter 2552 488 3862.
The DOI Library does not have enough copies to lend this book to everyone, so please purchase a copy or borrow one from your local library. Copies are available from online booksellers.
Since we will be encouraging an open discussion during the meeting, there will be no need to mute your phone or computer microphone. You also do not need to disable the camera capability and/or cover the camera lens on your computer but keep in mind that others viewing the webinar might be able to observe you at your home or workplace.
Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad
By Eric Foner
Hardcover/Paperback/Kindle: 352 Pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (2016)
More than any other scholar, Eric Foner has influenced our understanding of America's history. Now, making brilliant use of extraordinary evidence, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian once again reconfigures the national saga of American slavery and freedom.
A deeply entrenched institution, slavery lived on legally and commercially even in the northern states that had abolished it after the American Revolution. Slaves could be found in the streets of New York well after abolition, traveling with owners doing business with the city's major banks, merchants, and manufacturers. New York was also home to the North’s largest free black community, making it a magnet for fugitive slaves seeking refuge. Slave catchers and gangs of kidnappers roamed the city, seizing free blacks, often children, and sending them south to slavery.
To protect fugitives and fight kidnappings, the city's free blacks worked with white abolitionists to organize the New York Vigilance Committee in 1835. In the 1840s vigilance committees proliferated throughout the North and began collaborating to dispatch fugitive slaves from the upper South, Washington, and Baltimore, through Philadelphia and New York, to Albany, Syracuse, and Canada. These networks of antislavery resistance, centered on New York City, became known as the underground railroad. Forced to operate in secrecy by hostile laws, courts, and politicians, the city’s underground-railroad agents helped more than 3,000 fugitive slaves reach freedom between 1830 and 1860. Until now, their stories have remained largely unknown, their significance little understood.
Building on fresh evidence―including a detailed record of slave escapes secretly kept by Sydney Howard Gay, one of the key organizers in New York―Foner elevates the underground railroad from folklore to sweeping history. The story is inspiring―full of memorable characters making their first appearance on the historical stage―and significant―the controversy over fugitive slaves inflamed the sectional crisis of the 1850s. It eventually took a civil war to destroy American slavery, but here at last is the story of the courageous effort to fight slavery by "practical abolition," person by person, family by family.
-- from Amazon