[Durham INC] Durham County Library Hosts Program on Local History: The Story of Mary Walker

Wed May 16 17:44:39 EDT 2012

Dear Media Friends,

Please find attached, and embedded below, a news alert about an event happening at Durham County Library.

Thank you for publicizing the library, where great programs happen!

Gina

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Gina Rozier
Marketing and Development Manager
Durham County Library
P: 919-560-0151
F: 919-560-0137
durhamcountylibrary.org<http://www.durhamcountylibrary.org/>

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-News Alert-

Date: May 16, 2012                                                                                      CONTACT: Gina Rozier
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                 919-560-0151 or grozier at durhamcountync.gov<mailto:grozier at durhamcountync.gov>

Durham County Library Hosts Program on Local History: The Story of Mary Walker
Program:             Meet the Author: Dr. Sydney Nathans
Date:                     Tuesday, May 29
Time:                    7 p.m.
Location:             Main Library
300 N. Roxboro St.
Cost:                      Free and open to the public
About:  Duke University History Professor Emeritus, Dr. Sydney Nathans, will host a reading and discussion of his new work, To Free a Family, on Tuesday, May 29 at 7 p.m. at the Main Library. His book explores the case of Mary Walker, an enslaved woman who, in August 1848, escaped from her owner, Duncan Cameron of Stagville, leaving her children behind. Ultimately choosing to stay in Philadelphia instead of returning south, she spent the next 17 years trying to recover her family through attempts to buy or steal their freedom. She even appealed to the better instincts of the surviving Camerons by requesting they simply be set free. Walker's freedom, like that of thousands who escaped from bondage, came at a great price-remorse at parting without a word, and fear for her family's fate while separated from them.

Unlike her more famous counterparts-Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs and Sojourner Truth-who wrote their own narratives and whose public defiance made them heroines, Walker's efforts were protracted, wrenching  and private. Her odyssey was more representative of women refugees from bondage who labored secretly and behind the scenes to reclaim their families from the South. To Free a Family gives voice to their hidden epic of emancipation and to an untold story of the Civil War era.

Nathans, also the author of Daniel Webster and Jacksonian Democracy, is general editor of The Way We Lived in North Carolina, a five-volume series on the social history of North Carolina from settlement to the 20th century. He has received fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations and has won the James Harvey Robinson Award of the American Historical Association.

For more information about this program, contact Joanne Abel at 919-560-0268.

Durham County Library provides the entire community with books, services and other resources that inform, inspire learning, cultivate understanding and excite the imagination. For more information, visit your local library or visit us online at durhamcountylibrary.org.
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