![]() ![]() But, of course, what was much worse about slavery was how the loss of liberty and the underlying system of violence intertwined and reinforced one another. Mythologists have sometimes liked to imagine American slavery to be something akin to indentured servitude, or even adoption into a wealthy family. ![]() I remember little about the assignment, but I do recall being struck by two things: there were a great number of runaway slaves (little surprise really) and many of the slaves listed could be distinguished by disfiguring scars and wounds, or missing appendages. These are the sort of ads that Colson Whitehead mimics throughout his novel The Underground Railroad, the latest book I have retrieved from the Little Free Library across the street. ![]() About a quarter-century ago, when I was an unwashed undergraduate studying history in the faux-historical town of Williamsburg, Virginia, I completed an assignment for a primary research course in which I studied runaway slave postings from colonial era newspapers. ![]()
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