The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker: A True Tale of Love, Murder, Treason, and Ordinary Folks Who Saved America - REVIEW

by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

The year, 1851. The place, a Quaker farming community turned Underground Railroad stronghold, where a Maryland enslaver had journeyed in pursuit of four men who’d fled his plantation years before. In a few hours, he’d be dead…and twenty-seven men from the village of Christiana would be rounded up and put on trial. Not for his murder, but for treason—for waging war against the United States, at a time when it was a crime against the government to obstruct an enslaver looking to reclaim his “property.”

This is story of what happened in Christiana that September morning—and in the ensuing “trial of the century,” which saw the president himself advise the prosecution on strategy and a sitting congressman serve as lead attorney for the defense. But The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker is also a much larger tale, one spanning decades, following a whole startlingly diverse community of abolitionists in their fight to convince their fellow Americans of the subversive idea that now found itself on trial: that the nation ought to live up the ideals it was founded on, and respect all men as equals.

It’s a story that whisks readers from the quiet farmlands of Lancaster County—where a self-emancipated man named William Parker, whom legend had it bullets could not kill, rallied his neighbors to ride out each night to battle the slavecatchers who stalked their countryside—to Philadelphia’s genteel Society Hill, where socialite Harriet Forten Purvis had the ear of the mayor (and a cellar filled with fugitives). It’s stylish, propulsive, intimately human tale of bravery, ingenuity, and hope—and of ordinary people with little in common who came together to stand against injustice…and won.

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz is the New York Times bestselling author of Dr. Mütter’s Marvels, as well as eight collections of poetry. A seventh generation Pennsylvanian, she lives in Philadelphia with her husband, the novelist Ernest Cline, and their children.

Simon & Schuster
ISBN-13:‎ 978-1668035931

The Legacy of Lynching - REVIEW

by Rasul A. Mowatt

The Legacy of Lynching provides a critical social theory of the history of lynching as a pedagogy of social and political violence, power, and control (to identify-find-kill-display the body of the racial Other). The theory emphasizes the final stage of display as what truly constitutes a lynching and differentiates it from other forms of violence (race riots, recreational murder, racial hunting, bombings, and disappearances) and challenges other definitions of lynching (hanging, mob violence, extra-judicial, and racial terror). The book examines the socio-historical record of lynching in the United States, with additional attention to lynching activity and imagery of Australia, Britain, France, Germany, and India, to surface the nature of lynching as a public spectacle with important critical social and political dimensions that enact power in visible ways across racialized bodies, peoples, and spaces.

Lynching, in this book, is presented not just as a historical phenomenon or as a set of artifacts (picture postcards, shreds of clothing, pieces of rope, and other ephemeral), but also as a cultural production of State power and control that shapes social and political institutions, public spaces, and social memory. This socio-historical record of lynching, as such, reveals not only the mechanisms of previous instantiations of racialized power schemas (pogroms, ethnic cleansing, and genocide) but also the ongoing encoding of control and colonization of public life. Through a thorough re-reading and reworking of the history of lynching and its ongoing, contemporary afterlife, the book reconceptualizes the nature and ramifications of the phenomenon in various forms of media like film, television, social media platforms, gaming, graphic novels, fictional novellas, and even fashion. As such, it will be an important resource for podcasters, journalists, students, instructors, researchers, and readers in sociology, social theory, political sociology, historical sociology, American history and American studies, cultural studies, Race and ethnicity studies, and geography.

Rasul A. Mowatt is Professor and Researcher who studies State violence and the geographies of Race for the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, USA. Before joining NC State, Rasul served on Indiana University’s faculty in the Departments of American Studies and Geography for 17 years and previously taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence (2021), co-author of Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits (2024) and The City of Hip-Hop: New York, the Bronx, and a Peace Meeting (2025).

Routledge
ISBN-13:‎ 978-1041267577