On the Record will end October 3. I’m indebted to you, our listeners and to all those who spoke with our small team during these nine years--to all who explained what they’re pouring their energies into and why others in Baltimore and Maryland should listen and care. I wish I could re-interview and catch up with everyone who joined us On the Record. But time is short. Just a few shows left.
Sharing insights about Maryland’s history--from people who have lived it and from people who have studied it with rigor--has been a priority, On the Record.
In 2019 Richard Bell, a history professor at the University of Maryland, published a book titled 'STOLEN: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home.' It grabbed me like a Laura Lippman suspense novel, but the tale is precisely documented.
Five kids, 8 to 15 years old, each walking free on the streets of Philadelphia in August 1825 and, with the promise of an odd job, lured onto a ship — onto Maryland’s Eastern Shore — to Virginia — to a barefoot thousand-mile trek to Mississippi where their captors sold them to sugar and cotton planters. So common was this human trafficking, Bell calls it “the reverse Underground Railroad.”
An exciting story -- and Professor Bell has an ear for the exciting. He’s a fan-boy of 'Hamilton,' Lin-Manuel Miranda’s exuberantly popular hip-hop-soul-Rhythm & Blues adaptation of Ron Chernow’s biography of founding father Alexander Hamilton. In 2020 Bell shared with us his unabashed praise for the show and his historian’s critique of how Miranda airbrushed slavery and immigration.
Now Richard Bell is about to publish another historical page-turner: 'The American Revolution and the Fate of the World.' It looks at the war American rebels declared in 1776 as a global conflict -- basically a world war, even if it wasn’t called that. We talk to him about it.
