Dr. Richard Bell (Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland) is one of a handful of scholars who has received multiple research fellowships from the Library Company – first as a doctoral candidate at Harvard in 2003 and 2004, and later as a faculty member at the University of Maryland in 2012 and 2013. In 2013, Dr. Bell began work on the project matured into the remarkable new volume Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and their Astonishing Odyssey Home (Simon & Schuster, 2020).

Stolen shines a light on what Dr. Bell terms the “Reverse Underground Railroad,” a black market network of human traffickers and slave traders who stole away thousands of legally-free African Americans from families in free, northern cities, including Philadelphia. Deeply researched yet written in an accessible, direct voice, Stolen reveals the precarity of freedom through a microhistory of five boys kidnapped and transported to slaveholding states. Dr. Jill Lepore has called it a “heartbreaking and searing account of their stories that chronicles not only the agonies and atrocities of slavery, but the fragility of freedom, and the dauntlessness of resistance.”

[K stands for kidnapper.] New York, 1864.