Excellent book stories told by actually people that experienced emancipation. Through actual letters, journals and diaries compiled from the library of congress.

Interspaced with the McKissacks history of emancipation are quotations drawn from slave narratives and other primary sources and short sketches of individual participants starting with a black witness to the reading of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776 to the victory parade of Union forces in Washington in 1865. ( )