Adam Rothman is a professor of history at Georgetown University, where he teaches courses on slavery and abolition in the United States and the Atlantic world. He is the author of Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery (2015) and Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (2005), as well as a coauthor of Major Problems in Atlantic History (2007) and an associate editor of the Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History (2009). He was a member of Georgetown University's Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation, and is the principal curator of the online Georgetown Slavery Archive. He has worked extensively with middle school and high school teachers in the Washington, D.C., area to enrich U.S. history curriculum and teaching.
This lecture tells the story of Rose Herera, a slave woman in Louisiana, whose children were taken to Cuba during the Civil War. Her struggle to recover them is a poignant drama of the dream of justice at the moment of emancipation. This lecture is drawn from Rothman's award-winning book, Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery.