RECOLLECT - Episode #2

Karen Cook Bell is Associate Professor of History at Boowey State University, with an expertise in slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and women’s history. She is the author of Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia, and her most recent work, Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America. In this conversation, Bell sheds light on the undertold story of enslaved fugitive women, and the ways in which they risked everything to self-emancipate in the period before and after the Revolutionary War. Bell grounds her analysis around specific female fugitives, including “A Negro Wench Named Lucia” (Chapter One - 18th Century), “A Mulatto Women Named Margaret” (Chapter Two - Pre-Revolutionary Period), “A Well Dressed Woman Named Jenny” (Chapter Three - 1776-1781), and “A Negro Woman Called Bett” (Chapter 4 - Post-Revolutionary Period). “I dedicate this book to all the nameless women whose stories have yet to be told. I’m hoping that with this book, the agency of Black women will be appreciated and recognized for what it was, and what it is — transformational." - Karen Cook Bell.