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Description

If you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, which side would you want to win?

When the last British governor of Virginia declared that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the king would be emancipated, tens of thousands of slaves fled from farms, plantations, and cities to try to reach the British camp. A military strategy originally designed to break the plantations of the American South had unleashed one of the great exoduses in U.S. history. With powerfully vivid storytelling, Schama details the odyssey of the escaped blacks through the fires of war and the terror of potential recapture, shedding light on an extraordinary, little-known chapter in the dark saga of American slavery.

About the Author

Simon Schama is a professor of art history and history at Columbia University, and is the author of numerous award-winning books; Rough Crossings, his history of the American Revolution, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction. He is a cultural essayist for the New Yorker and has written and presented more than thirty documentaries for the BBC, PBS, and the History Channel, including The Power of Art, which won the 2007 International Emmy for Best Arts Programming, and The American Future: A History, now available on DVD.

Praise for Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution…

“A lively and accessible book.”
-Newsday

“. . .plenty of gorgeous writing from this most elegant of stylists.”
-Christian Science Monitor

Simon Schama’s Rough Crossings . . . brilliantly re-creates the histories of runaway slaves in and after the American revolution.
-Sunday Times (London)

“If there’s a better living writer of history than Simon Schama, I’d sure like to know who it is.”
-Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Schama tells this complex story through a series of richly drawn, idiosyncratic individuals, from musical bureaucrats to rebellious slaves.”
-San Diego Union-Tribune

” Schama is back at his best -and historians don’t come much better than that.
-Sunday Times (London)

“A master storyteller.”
-Newsweek