"An engaging, multi-faceted study of 'place' in the 'post-emancipation nation,'
Emancipation's Diaspora provides a window into the emerging national history of the transition from slavery to freedom."
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The Journal of African American History"A study that scholars will find at times familiar, at times surprising, but always engaging."--
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The Historian"
Emancipation's Diaspora is ambitious and rewarding, making tangible the personal and political impact of slavery beyond the South and beyond 1865. . . . Although other historians have studied northern states during Reconstruction, none begins with the insight that they too faced emancipation. . . . Schwalm achieves a geographical and chronological reorientation through her remarkable rendering of the grief, joys, and longings of ordinary people."
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Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era"[Schwalm] has done historians of race, slavery, and Reconstruction a great service by locating her study in a veritable no-man's land [the Midwest]. . . . Impressive."
-H-Net Reviews
"Expand[s] our historical understanding of black migration and presence in the Midwest after the Civil War. . . . [The] diversity of sources . . . creates an especially rich base of evidence that tells the story of Iowa, but also of the region and the country as a whole. . . . An important book for all scholars of midwestern history."
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Annals of Iowa"Breadth and ingenuity in research, historiographical sophistication, and a lucid prose style make this study a major contribution."
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American Historical Review"[A] remarkable book. . . . Relying on an impressive array of manuscript collections, newspapers, census data, diaries, letters, army records, and memoirs, Schwalm makes a case that is undeniable. . . . The book is especially strong in bringing into focus the lives of black women."
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Minnesota History"Confirms US Reconstruction's national dimensions. . . . Recommended."
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Choice"A much needed addition to the growing historiography on emancipation and Reconstruction. . . . Innovative. . . . Persuasively demonstrates that historians would be remiss to ignore the consequences of emancipation and its subsequent diaspora in regions outside of the slave South--specifically, the Upper Midwest."
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Indiana Magazine of History"[A] beautifully researched book….Schwalm's greatest contribution to this scholarship is her consistent and persuasive engagement of gender…. A bid for a new narrative, one that recognizes both women's contributions and the masculine discourse that has masked them."
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Law and History Review"Drawing from an extensive and extremely rich range of source materials . . . Schwalm successfully captures the voices and experiences of black and white Midwesterners. . . . An intimate portrayal of blacks' lives contextualized by the broader forces of race and war. . . . A careful study of a neglected region . . . greatly advances our understanding of race and Reconstruction."
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Alpata"Schwalm presents the history of the black diaspora into the Reconstruction Midwest with impressive skill, learning, and insight….practic[ing] cultural history skillfully without succumbing to the obtuse language often associated with it….Schwalm has expanded the traditional story of Reconstruction in new and exciting ways"
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Journal of Social History"This book's regional focus and its attention to gender and women's experiences make it a crucial contribution to an ongoing reevaluation of black history, racial politics, and sectional identity in the nineteenth-century North. . . . Schwalm deftly uses archival and published military records. . . . An invaluable entry in a growing body of scholarship on the impact of slavery and its legacies outside the South."
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Civil War History"An engaging analysis of a region that historians of race have neglected. . . . [An] important book."
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Journal of Southern History"
Emancipation's Diaspora successfully demolishes the insistence of some authors that emancipation really did not change anything, but it is also exquisitely sensitive to the very complicated nature of emancipation's impact on ideas about race in the United States. . . . It is impossible to finish this book and not see slavery, race, and emancipation as truly
national questions whose repercussions continued to reverberate throughout the entire nineteenth century and beyond."
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Journal of Illinois History
