John Hope Franklin is James B. Duke Professor of History, Emeritus, at Duke University. He is a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the author of numerous books, including the epic From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, which boasts more than three million copies in print. Loren Schweninger is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

they provide an amazing wealth of detail on the backgrounds and experiences of bondsmen and bondswomen who were so discontented with slavery, or at least with their particular experience of it, that they simply ran away./ John Shelton Read, the William Rand Kenan, Jr, Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in the TLS, 30/04/99