Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking - REVIEW

by Toni Tipton-Martin

A BEST COOKBOOK OF THE YEAR - The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, NPR, Chicago Tribune, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Food52

Throughout her career, Toni Tipton-Martin has shed new light on the history, breadth, and depth of African American cuisine. She’s introduced us to black cooks, some long forgotten, who established much of what’s considered to be our national cuisine. After all, if Thomas Jefferson introduced French haute cuisine to this country, who do you think actually cooked it?

In Jubilee, Tipton-Martin brings these masters into our kitchens. Through recipes and stories, we cook along with these pioneering figures, from enslaved chefs to middle- and upper-class writers and entrepreneurs. With more than 100 recipes, from classics such as Sweet Potato Biscuits, Seafood Gumbo, Buttermilk Fried Chicken, and Pecan Pie with Bourbon to lesser-known but even more decadent dishes like Bourbon & Apple Hot Toddies, Spoon Bread, and Baked Ham Glazed with Champagne, Jubilee presents techniques, ingredients, and dishes that show the roots of African American cooking—deeply beautiful, culturally diverse, fit for celebration.

Toni Tipton-Martin is a culinary journalist and community activist and the author of the James Beard Award–winning The Jemima Code. Her collection of more than three hundred African American cookbooks has been exhibited at the James Beard House, and she has twice been invited to the White House to participate in First Lady Michelle Obama’s programs to raise a healthier generation of kids. Tipton-Martin is a founding member of the Southern Foodways Alliance and Foodways Texas. In 2021, she was named the Julia Child Award recipient.

Clarkson Potter
ISBN-13: 978-1524761738

An African American Cookbook: Exploring Black History and Culture Through Traditional Foods – REVIEW

by Phoebe Bailey

An African American Cookbook: Exploring Black History and Culture Through Traditional Foods is a bountiful collection of favorite foods and the memories that go with them. The foods reflect the ingenious, resourceful, and imaginative Africans who made them. Woven among the four hundred recipes are rich historic anecdotes and sayings. They were discovered or lived by the cookbook’s contributors, many of whose ancestors participated in the Underground Railroad or lived near where it was active. This is a cookbook rich in history and rich in easy-to-prepare, wonderfully tasty food! Recipes include:

• Collard greens with ham hocks

• Cornbread sausage stuffing

• Smoked turkey and black-eyed peas

• Pan-fried okra

• Fried green tomatoes

• 14-day sweet pickles

• Yogurt and chives biscuits

• Sweet potato pie

Author Phoebe Bailey’s congregation in historic Lancaster, Pennsylvania, has a long history with Underground Railroad activity. Today they offer Underground Railroad reenactments and a buffet of traditional African American food to their many visitors. This cookbook celebrates those historic events, when this church fed and then helped to spirit enslaved Africans to safety. Phoebe Bailey was born the youngest of 15 children in a family from Huntington, Long Island, New York. Phoebe has been encouraged by her father's strength and courage as a black man, and inspired by her mother's faith in God and undeniable intelligence as a black woman, to embrace herself and her African heritage. Phoebe began her career with Bethel Harambee Historical Services as a call from God. She left the corporate world to work closely with her brother, The Reverend Edward M. Bailey, and the congregation of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, to preserve and tell the stories of those Africans who have been discounted and left out of traditional American history and to restore and rebuild a community of faith. She lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Good Books
ISBN-13: 978-1680996456

A Southern Underground Railroad: Black Georgians and the Promise of Spanish Florida and Indian Country - REVIEW

by Paul M. Pressly

Despite its apparent isolation as an older region of the country, the Southeast provided a vital connecting link between the Black self-emancipation that occurred during the American Revolution and the growth of the Underground Railroad in the final years of the antebellum period. From the beginning of the revolutionary war to the eve of the First Seminole War in 1817, hundreds and eventually several thousand Africans and African Americans in Georgia, and to a lesser extent South Carolina, crossed the borders and boundaries that separated the Lowcountry from the British and Spanish in coastal Florida and from the Seminole and Creek people in the vast interior of the Southeast. Even in times of peace, there remained a steady flow of individuals moving south and southwest, reflecting the aspirations of a captive people.

A Southern Underground Railroad constitutes a powerful counter-narrative in American history, a tale of how enslaved men and women found freedom and human dignity not in Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty” but outside the expanding boundaries of the United States. It is a potent reminder of the strength of Black resistance in the post-revolutionary South and the ability of this community to influence the balance of power in a contested region. Paul M. Pressly’s research shows that their movement across borders was an integral part of the sustained struggle for dominance in the Southeast not only among the Great Powers but also among the many different racial, ethnic, and religious groups that inhabited the region and contended for control.

University of Georgia Press
ISBN-13 978-0820366852

Vigilance: The Life of William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad - REVIEW

by Andrew K. Diemer

The remarkable and inspiring story of William Still, an unknown abolitionist who dedicated his life to managing a critical section of the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia—the free state directly north of the Mason-Dixon Line—helping hundreds of people escape from slavery.

Born free in 1821 to two parents who had been enslaved, William Still was drawn to antislavery work from a young age. Hired as a clerk at the Anti-Slavery office in Philadelphia after teaching himself to read and write, he began directly assisting enslaved people who were crossing over from the South into freedom. Andrew Diemer captures the full range and accomplishments of Still’s life, from his resistance to Fugitive Slave Laws and his relationship with John Brown before the war, to his long career fighting for citizenship rights and desegregation until the early twentieth century.

Despite Still’s disappearance from history books, during his lifetime he was known as “the Father of the Underground Railroad.” Working alongside Harriet Tubman and others at the center of the struggle for Black freedom, Still helped to lay the groundwork for long-lasting activism in the Black community, insisting that the success of their efforts lay not in the work of a few charismatic leaders, but in the cultivation of extensive grassroots networks.  Through meticulous research and engaging writing, Vigilance establishes William Still in his rightful place in American history as a major figure of the abolitionist movement.

Knopf (432 pages)
ISBN-13: 978-0593534380

William Still: The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia - REVIEW

      The first full-length biography of William Still, one of the most important leaders of the Underground Railroad.

     William Still: The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia is the first major biography of the free black abolitionist William Still, who coordinated the Eastern Line of the Underground Railroad and was a pillar of the Railroad as a whole. Based in Philadelphia, Still built a reputation as a courageous leader, writer, philanthropist, and guide for fugitive slaves. This monumental work details Still’s life story beginning with his parents’ escape from bondage in the early nineteenth century and continuing through his youth and adulthood as one of the nation’s most important Underground Railroad agents and, later, as an early civil rights pioneer. Still worked personally with Harriet Tubman, assisted the family of John Brown, helped Brown’s associates escape from Harper’s Ferry after their famous raid, and was a rival to Frederick Douglass among nationally prominent African American abolitionists. Still’s life story is told in the broader context of the anti-slavery movement, Philadelphia Quaker and free black history, and the generational conflict that occurred between Still and a younger group of free black activists led by Octavius Catto.

     Unique to this book is an accessible and detailed database of the 995 fugitives Still helped escape from the South to the North and Canada between 1853 and 1861. The database contains twenty different fields―including name, age, gender, skin color, date of escape, place of origin, mode of transportation, and literacy―and serves as a valuable aid for scholars by offering the opportunity to find new information, and therefore a new perspective, on runaway slaves who escaped on the Eastern Line of the Underground Railroad. Based on Still’s own writings and a multivariate statistical analysis of the database of the runaways he assisted on their escape to freedom, the book challenges previously accepted interpretations of the Underground Railroad. The audience for William Still is a diverse one, including scholars and general readers interested in the history of the anti-slavery movement and the operation of the Underground Railroad, as well as genealogists tracing African American ancestors.

     William C. Kashatus holds a doctorate in history education from the University of Pennsylvanie. He curated Just Over the Line: Chester County and the Underground Railroad, recognized by The Journal of American History as a "first rate exhibit and model of outrerach to the local community" and winner of the American Association of Historical Societies and Museums Award of Merit. He is the author or co-author of thirty books, including Harriet Tubman: A Biography and In Pursuit of Freedom: Teaching the Underground Railroad.

William Still: The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia
 by William C. Kashatus
University of Notre Dame Press | ISBN: 978-0268-200-367