Richard Bell is professor of history at the University of Maryland. His most recent book, Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home, was a finalist for the 2020 George Washington Prize and the 2020 Harriet Tubman Prize. Stolen shines a glaring spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad, a criminal network of human traffickers who stole away thousands of legally free people of color from their families in order to fuel slavery’s rapid expansion in the decades before the Civil War.
Bell has held major research fellowships at Cambridge, Yale, and the Library of Congress, and is the recipient of the National Endowment of the Humanities Public Scholar award. He serves as a trustee of the Maryland Center for History and Culture, and as a founding member of the University of Maryland’s chapter of the Universities Studying Slavery consortium.
His project, “The First Freedom Riders: Streetcars and Street Fights in Jim Crow New York,” examines the struggles of Black New Yorkers to desegregate the city’s mass transit in the mid-19th century, spurring nationwide civil disobedience against Jim Crow.
https://richard-bell.com/
