William Still’s meticulously recorded collection of narratives of escape–unlike traditional autobiographical slave narratives–chronicles a wide variety of stories, laying the tracks of the Underground Railroad through correspondences, legal documents, transcribed speech, reward advertisements, and biographical sketches. Together they form an unprecedented and essential archive chronicling the efforts for freedom of escaped slaves.

The Underground Rail Road Records offers some of the best evidence we have of this extraordinarily covert resistance network, and narrates a series of chapters that, at their creative determination seem almost magical. The stories bear witness to the intense desire for freedom–and the powerful agency of the enslaved to acquire it. Their stories are moving and remarkable–like that of William Peel, who wrapped himself in straw to be shipped in a box that carried him north. Or Clarissa Davis, who hid in a coop for more than two months and was smuggled aboard a ship, dressed in male attire.

Originally published in 1872, but never timelier, The Underground Railroad records affirm the powerful draw of freedom and the imaginative means people went to achieve it, and brings to life the human drama of women, men, and children taking the most dramatic risks imaginable to escape the horrors of bondage.