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Richard Bell

Biography

Richard Bell

Richard Bell teaches Early American history at the University of Maryland. He has received several teaching prizes and major research fellowships including the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award. His first book, WE SHALL BE NO MORE: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States, was published in 2012. He is also the author of STOLEN: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home.

Richard Bell

Books by Richard Bell

by Richard Bell - History, Nonfiction, True Crime

Philadelphia, 1825: Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, five young, free Black boys are instead met with blindfolds, ropes and knives. Over four long months, their kidnappers drive them overland into the Cotton Kingdom to be sold as slaves. Determined to resist, the boys form a tight brotherhood as they struggle to free themselves and find their way home. Their ordeal shines a glaring spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad, a black market network of human traffickers and slave traders who stole away thousands of legally free African Americans from their families in order to fuel slavery’s rapid expansion in the decades before the Civil War.