investigates how African American women in Philadelphia journeyed from enslavement to the precarious status of ?free persons� in the decades leading up to the Civil War and examines comparable developments in the cities of New York and Boston. Erica Armstrong Dunbar argues that early nineteenth-century Philadelphia, where most African Americans were free, enacted a kind of rehearsal for the national emancipation that followed in the post-Civil War years. She explores the lives of the ?regular� women of antebellum Philadelphia, the free black institutions that took root there, and the previously unrecognized importance of African American women to the history of American cities.  (20090301)

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