Finalist for the Governor's Award given by the Kentucky Historical Society.
I easily rank this as my #1 book of the year, for general readers and academics alike.
~AfroAmericanHeritage.com
Griffler has done a fine job rescuing lost stories. His objective to create a more racially balanced history of the Underground Railroad is timely and eminently sensible.
~American Historical Review
This innovative examination of the Underground Railroad explores the often neglected and overlooked roles African Americans played.... Griffler introduces a variety of African American voices and viewpoints. An important contribution.
~Booklist
Griffler has provided the reader with names of largely unheralded white and black heroes and heroines normally neglected in any studies of this subject.
~Bowling Green (KY) Daily News
Griffler has made an important scholarly contribution to the historiography of the Underground Railroad by focusing on the 'front line' of this emancipation network-the African Americans who led so many bonds people across the Ohio River.... Highly recommended.
~Choice
Both refreshing and compelling, highlighting the major role that African-Americans in Ohio, individually and communally, played in the ferrying of freedom seekers from Kentucky, Virginia, and other slave states to freedom in the North.
~Civil War Book Review
Frontline of Freedom is a valuable contribution to the growing field of Underground Railroad studies, and one hopes the field will continue in this vein. It is not a simplistic triumphal history of black involvements and interracial cooperation. It is a stirring reminder of the high price of freedom, and of what ordinary men and women, black and white, were willing to risk and endure to pay that price.
~Civil War History
Bold, imaginative, and important, Griffler's short masterpiece will join the front line of classics on the antislavery movement.
~H-Net Reviews
Griffler's important, well-written account... is part of welcome recent efforts to focus on the role of African Americans in the UGRR.
~Indiana Magazine of History
Griffler's book introduces so many vibrant lives and events, transformations and telling details, that by book's end the reader is eager for more, rather than less-again, a welcome change, and an accomplishment of which the author can be proud.
~Journal of American History
An important work that makes explicit the role African Americans performed in liberating themselves and fellow bondsmen during the antebellum era.
~Journal of Illinois History
Griffler makes his case well, and in doing so not only offers a necessary corrective to earlier Underground Railroad history but also reminds us that black activity of this sort could not have occurred in a vacuum, the isolated acts of a heroic few.
~Journal of Southern History
Highly informative and engaging.... A must read for all scholars of antebellum America who surely will come away from it with a fresh new perspective on this important aspect of United States history.
~Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society
A well-researched book that explores closely the dynamics of the operation; exactly who helped whom, the logistics involved, the problems encountered, and black settlements in the North.
~Kentucky Monthly
Well researched and well written. An excellent account of the role of African Americans in the aid given fugitive slaves, as well as the major contribution made by the fugitives themselves in their own liberation.
~Larry Gara, Professor Emeritus of History, Wilmington College and author of The
Griffler delves into this little-understood topic to give us a mountain of information.
~Northern Kentucky Heritage
Introduces readers to a host of Ohio River Valley black abolitionists whose involvement in the Underground Railroad was previously unknown.
~Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
Redeems a shamefully neglected part of our collective memory. Collecting new and extant oral histories, Dr. Griffler shows that the actual relationship between the races was far richer and more textured than the written record alone would suggest.
~Rita Kohn
Griffler's volume excels in presenting an original and extremely useful... interpretation of the origins, character, and growth of the Underground Railroad in this vital region.
~The Historian
Griffler has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the role of African Americans in the early formation of the system as well as identified a number of previously underutilized sources.
~West Virginia History
