A thoughtful and illuminating bicycle journey along the Underground Railroad by a climate scientist seeking to engage with American history.
Join us to celebrate David Goodrich's latest book, On Freedom Road.
Thursday, May4th, 2023 at 7pm at Auntie's Bookstore (402 W Main Ave).
This event is free and open to the public.
RSVP below!
About the book
Over the course of four years, David Goodrich rode his bicycle 3,000 miles east of the Mississippi to travel the routes of the Underground Railroad and explore the history in the places where it happened. Goodrich followed the most famous of conductors, Harriet Tubman, from where she was enslaved in Maryland to her family sanctuary at a tiny chapel in Ontario, Canada. Travelling south, he rode from New Orleans, where the enslaved were bought and sold, through Mississippi and the heart of the Delta Blues. Goodrich brings us to the Borderland along the Ohio River, a kind of no-mans-land between North and South in the years before the Civil War, where slave hunters roamed both banks of the river.
On Freedom Road lets us see well-known places in the East—New York and Philadelphia, New Orleans and Buffalo—in a different light: from the vantage point of desperate people seeking to outrun the reach of slavery. Join in this journey to find the heroes and stories, known and hidden, of the Underground Railroad.
About the author
David Goodrich worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and served as the Director of the UN Global Climate Observing System in Geneva, Switzerland. In addition to cycling across the US to Oregon, he has ridden down the Appalachians and across Montana, South Dakota, France and Spain. He lives in Maryland.
A thoughtful and illuminating bicycle journey along the Underground Railroad by a climate scientist seeking to engage with American history.
The traces of the Underground Railroad hide in plain sight: a great church in Philadelphia; a humble old house backing up to the New Jersey Turnpike; an industrial outbuilding in Ohio.