dann J. Broyld
Borderland Blacks: Two Cities in the Niagara Region during the Final Decades of Slavery by dann j. Broyld examines Rochester, New York, and St. Catharines, Canada West, the last stops on the Niagara branch of the Underground Railroad. The story that is best known of Rochester and St. Catharines before the Civil War is a one-way flow on the “Underground Railroad”—America-to-Canada. But the relationship is actually much more complex, the doors of the border swung open in both directions, and ultimately reveals an understudied part of the Atlantic world. Borderland Blacks moves these Niagara cities away from the local and national context, and places them into the transnational and international conversation which is more befitting of the global world we live in today, and moreover is a better historical reflection of their disposition beyond the domestic.
The book is neither uniquely an American story nor separately Canadian, but it unites the nations and people together comprehensively. The study involves complex individuals, like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Anthony Burns, and Hiram Wilson, who negotiated the overlapping worlds of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and the African Diaspora. The lives of Blacks in the borderlands of Rochester and St. Catharines were intertwined by shared newspapers, annual celebrations, religious organizations, as well as kinship and friendship ties that were reinforced by regular border crossings. In all, the objective of Borderland Blacks is to elucidate how the times and terms of emancipation affected Blacks on each side of the border, while demonstrating their political agency to pit the United States and British Canada against one another for the best possible outcomes.
Book reviewers Richard Bell of the University of Maryland, and Jennifer J. Thompson Burns of the University at Albany SUNY have written balanced and favorable assessments of Borderland Blacks.[1] Bell explained, “it is deeply versed in the literature of transboundary social formation and engages with and successfully challenges a panoply of U.S.-centric scholarship on the Underground Railroad.” And Burns underscored that “Borderland Blacks is meticulously researched, masterfully structured, and written with such clarity it seamlessly demystifies the complex lives and agency of ordinary Black people determined to exercise autonomy and work toward social change.” She expounded, “Those familiar with Broyld’s other publications will find that Borderland Blacks solidifies his place as a deeply conceptual scholar at the forefront in the fields of Black transnational identity.” Bell and Burns sincerely grasp the intrinsic value of this tome.
Please see the website of LSU Press https://lsupress.org/books/detail/borderland-blacks/ to find out more about the book and Broyld’s website www.dannjbroyld.com to explore his other publications, particularly: “The Underground Railroad as Afrofuturism: Enslaved Blacks Who Imagined A Future and Used Technology to Reach The ‘Outer Spaces of Slavery,’” “Before the Bricks and Mortar: The Grassroots of Developing the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument,” and “Signs & Wonders: An Analysis of Artists and Astrology” written for the 30 Americans exhibit hosted at the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut, from June 16 to October 30, 2022. Certainly, his work has grown in creativity and analytical approach over time.
Broyld has also delivered a series of public lectures and conference presentations on Borderland Blacks, including papers at the Transatlantic Studies Conference in Canterbury, England, the University of Toronto’s Fisher Library and Osgoode Society, and he Keynoted the 2022 Middle Atlantic and New England Council for Canadian Studies. Each lecture revolved around American-Canadian transnational relations during the pre-1900 era and challenged constructed borders, whether national, racial, or sexual. Overall, Broyld seeks to continue to contribute to meaningful scholarship that both fills historiography gaps and enriches the study of African Americans, Black Canadians, and others in the African Diaspora. Stay tuned; he is a scholar that has much more to write and say.
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dann j. Broyld is an associate professor of African American History at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He earned his PhD in nineteenth-century United States and African Diaspora History at Howard University. His work focuses on the American–Canadian borderlands and issues of Black identity, migration, and transnational relations as well as oral history, material culture, and museum-community interactions. Broyld was a 2017-18 Fulbright Canada scholar at Brock University and his book Borderland Blacks: Two Cities in the Niagara Region During the Final Decades of Slavery (2022) is published with the Louisiana State University Press.
[1] Richard Bell, (May 2023) “Borderland Blacks: Two Cities in the Niagara Region during the Final Decades of Slavery.” The Journal of Southern History, Vol. LXXXIX, No. 2, pp. 359-360; and Jennifer J. Thompson Burns, (Summer 2022) “Borderland Blacks: Two Cities in the Niagara Region during the Final Decades of Slavery.” Civil War Book Review, Vol. 24, Iss. 3, pp. 1-3.
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