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\nFebruary is Black H istory Month.
\nPhiladelphia\, 1825: five young\, free blac k boys fall into the clutches of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the United States. Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay\, they are instead met with blindfolds\, ropes\, and knives. Over four long months\, their kidnappers drive them overland into the Cott on Kingdom to be sold as slaves. Determined to resist\, the boys form a ti ght brotherhood as they struggle to free themselves and find their way hom e.
\nTheir ordeal - an odyssey that takes them from the Philadelphia waterfront to the marshes of Mississippi and then onward still - shines a glaring spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad\, a black market ne twork of human traffickers\, and slave traders who stole away thousands of legally free African Americans from their families in order to fuel slave ry&rsquo\;s rapid expansion in the decades before the Civil War.
\nP resenter: Richard Bell is Professor of History at the University of Maryla nd and author of \;the new book "Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and their Astonishing Odyssey \;Home" which was a finalist fo r the 2020 George Washington Prize and the 2020 Harriet Tubman Prize. He h as \;held \;major research fellowships at Yale\, Cambridge\, and t he Library of Congress\, and is the recipient of the National Endowment of the Humanities Public Scholar award. He serves as a Trustee of the Maryla nd Center for History and Culture\, as an elected member of the Colonial S ociety of Massachusetts\, and as a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. &rdquo\;
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