Comprised of thirteen erudite, informed and informative contributions, A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland is an impressive work of seminal scholarship and a very highly valued addition to academic library American History and 19th Century Black History collections. While of enduring value for academia, A Fluid Frontier will also prove to be of exceptional interest to the non-specialist general reader with respect to the history of the 18th Century abolitionist movement in general, and the famed 'underground railroad' in particular.

A Fluid Frontier is both a good read and an essential reference. It goes well beyond a useful assemblage of recent scholarship by Canadian and American, academic and community historians. Editors Karolyn Smardz Frost and Veta Smith Tucker have created a context of Black agency and the transnational community created on the Detroit River borderland that will inform and spur research for years to come. They and the other contributors challenge popular conceptions of the Underground Railroad by offering well-documented histories of self-liberating freedom-seekers and those who aided them, as well as of the Black community that spanned the river, creating churches, schools, and a movement to ensure the lasting freedom of Black people, whether free born or fugitives from slavery.

Karolyn Smardz Frost and Veta Smith Tucker, editors of A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland, have compiled a collection of essays that demonstrate the significance of the Detroit River region in the history of the Underground Railroad, black transnational activism, and borderlands histories that are exciting, useful, and generative.

In the steady stream of new publications about the Underground Railroad, every now and then one arrives that is particularly worthy of note. A Fluid Frontier stakes its claim to scholarly and public attention in taking up the important and somewhat-neglected question of the U.S.-Canadian border, focusing on one of its most significant stretches in the Detroit River region. Its thirteen papers are worthy scholarship that adds measurably to our knowledge of the Underground Railroad, antislavery activities, and African American communities, as do the introductory and concluding essays by the editors, and the brief forward by David W. Blight.

. . . in creating this rich borderland portrait, the authors shed considerable light on the liminal nature of power.

[. . .] a thought-provoking work [. . .] that hightlight[s] various aspects of the Underground Railroad in communities along the Detroit River Borderland.

In this beautifully illustrated, deeply researched book, we recognize parallels with Detroit's contemporary movements for water rights, urban agriculture, eviction defense and freedom schools. It's stunning to discover that one common element in virtually every 19th century activist's biographical sketch presented in this volume concerns either setting up independent schools for freedom-seekers, fighting to desegregate public schools, or both!