Freedom's Edge takes the reader directly into the heart of the debate over the relationship between religious freedom and LGBT and reproductive rights. The book explains these complex areas of law, and what is at stake in the battle to protect each of these rights. The book argues that religious freedom and sexual freedom share some common elements and that in most contexts it is possible to protect both. Freedom's Edge explains why this is so, and provides a roadmap for finding common ground and maximizing freedoms on both sides. The book will enable anyone with an interest in these issues to understand what the law actually teaches us about religious freedom, sexual freedom, and how they interact. This is important because what is often argued by partisans on both sides distorts the legal and cultural stakes, and diminishes the possibility of compromise.

Even after the Civil War, blacks despaired of being treated as equals in a white man’s world. They were deprived of many of the most basic rights of citizenship, and were often cheated and exploited. As a result they clung tenaciously to that most important of new rights—the right to move. At Freedom’s Edge is William Cohen’s comprehensive history of black mobility from the Civil War to World War I. Cohen treats mobility as a central component of black freedom, crucial in the emergence of a free labor system, and equally crucial as an obstacle to the persistent southern white effort to reassert hegemony over blacks in all areas of life. This study has a rigorously southern focus. Most historians of black migration concentrate on telling how the migrants adjusted to northern life, but Cohen provides detailed accounts of internal southern movement and efforts to leave the South. He also examines the relative absence, during this period, of significant migration to the North. Cohen presents a thorough treatment of the efforts of the Freedmen’s Bureau to restructure the southern labor system, showing how heavily this organization was influenced by questions involving black mobility. He also gives the fullest picture yet of the postwar emergence of the occupation of the labor agent. Among the migration episodes he considers are the Liberia movement, the Kansas exodus, the movement of blacks from Georgia and the Carolinas to Arkansas and Mississippi, and the migration to Oklahoma. The post-Reconstruction era was marked by a concerted white thrust to destroy black freedom. Cohen shows that while whites succeeded in establishing almost total dominion in the political and social realms, they failed when they tried to erect a system of involuntary servitude that would seriously limit black movement. Cohen argues that the difference here arose from the fact that whites were largely united on matters such as suffrage and segregation but were divided on the desirability of immobilizing the black labor force. Those who depended on black labor sought legal formulas aimed at stopping black movement. They met resistance, however, from those who did not share their economic interests. This study, then, is almost as much a legal history of white efforts to interdict black movement as it is a history of black migration. At Freedom’s Edge is a probing study of the black search for freedom within freedom.

In 1978, 24-year-old Victoria Ginn travelled to Afghanistan to photograph wild places and the people who live there. As the country disintegrated into war, Ginn was thrown into prison with many other women. This is the true story of her torturous journey through a harsh, alien culture.

"[This book is] an ... examination of how we can respond to suffering, live our fullest lives, and remain open to the full spectrum of our human experience"--Amazon.com.

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This groundbreaking Civil War history illuminates the unique development of antislavery sentiment in the border region of south central Pennsylvania. During the antebellum decades every single fugitive slave escaping by land east of the Appalachian Mountains had to pass through south central Pennsylvania, where they faced both significant opportunities and substantial risks. While the hundreds of fugitives traveling through Adams, Franklin, and Cumberland counties were aided by an effective Underground Railroad, they also faced slave catchers and informers. In On the Edge of Freedom, historian David G. Smith traces the victories of antislavery activists in south central Pennsylvania, including the achievement of a strong personal liberty law and the aggressive prosecution of kidnappers who seized African Americans as fugitives. He also documents how their success provoked Southern retaliation and the passage of a strengthened Fugitive Slave Law in 1850. Smith explores the fugitive slave issue through fifty years of sectional conflict, war, and reconstruction in south central Pennsylvania and provocatively questions what was gained by emphasizing fugitive protection over immediate abolition and full equality. Smith argues that after the war, social and demographic changes in southern Pennsylvania worked against African Americans’ achieving equal opportunity. Although local literature portrayed this area as a vanguard of the Underground Railroad, African Americans still lived “on the edge of freedom.” Winner of the Hortense Simmons Prize