Description
Queens Historical Society, Published 1999. Paperback, x, 103 pp.; 26 cm; edited by Wini Warren; illustrated with black-and-white photographs, facsimiles, maps and portraits.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
112
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Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In Good condition. Sepia-toned illustrated covers, brown lettering on front cover and spine. Bumping and creasing to edges and corners, mild overall shelf and edge wear. Spotting and soiling to the front cover, with a more noticeable spot at upper left, and scattered spotting to the rear cover. Publisher's ISBN label to rear cover with the price in ink. Glued binding starting to pull away at the top of the inner hinge, the title leaf beginning to separate along the top of the gutter; all pages present and the remaining leaves firmly attached. Otherwise pages are clean and unmarked. Five essays arguing that Queens and Long Island were the birthplace of American abolitionism, and that local sites formed the first stations of what became the Underground Railroad. Derek Gray traces slavery in New York from Dutch to English rule; Kathleen Velsor covers the Hicksite Quaker families behind the Long Island anti-slavery movement and the Queens Freedom Trail through White Pot, Westbury and Jericho; Richard Hourahan reconstructs the free Black community of Flushing from census data; James Driscoll works from the diaries of Samuel Parsons. Elias Hicks, Henry Highland Garnet, Charles B. Ray and David Ruggles all figure. Illustrations come from the Schomburg Center, the Bowne House Historical Society and the Long Island Star, among them runaway advertisements, the 1731 New York law restricting slave activities, and an 1841 map of an African-American neighborhood in Flushing. Grant-funded and published by the Society rather than trade-distributed. Velsor had been researching the subject since 1994 and later wrote The Underground Railroad on Long Island (2013). Contents: Preface; Acknowledgements; Illustrations; Introduction (Wini Warren); Slavery and Resistance in the Empire State (Derek Gray); Quaker Families and Their Connections: The Long Island Origins of the Anti-Slavery Movement (Kathleen G. Velsor); African Americans in Flushing, New York: 1800-1860 (Richard J. Hourahan); The Queens Freedom Trail (Kathleen G. Velsor); Flushing in the Early Nineteenth Century (James Driscoll); Index.