Join the New York Times best-selling author Ilyon Woo for a discussion of her new book Master Slave Husband Wife.

In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North. Master Slave Husband Wife is the true story of the Crafts’ long journey to freedom, as they traveled another 1,000 miles on the abolitionist lecture circuit; escaped slave hunters, following the passage of an infamous new Fugitive Slave Law; and were forced to flee again, this time from the United States. Theirs is an American love story, one that would challenge the nation’s core precepts of life, liberty, and justice for all—one that challenges us even now.

Ilyon Woo is the New York Times best-selling author of Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey From Slavery to Freedom, and The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times. She has written for The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, and Time Magazine, and she has received support for her research from the the Whiting Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among other organizations. She holds a BA in the Humanities from Yale College and a PhD in English from Columbia University. This program is sponsored by the Cambridge Public Library Foundation.

Dr. Myisha S. Eatmon is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in African and African American Studies and History. Dr. Eatmon was a research fellow and a tenure-track Assistant Professor in History at the University of South Carolina before she joined the faculty at Harvard in 2022. Professor Eatmon is a Chapel Hill, North Carolina native who received a B.A. in Political Science and History from the University of Notre Dame. She also holds an M.A. in United States history and a Ph.D. in United States, African American, and legal history from Northwestern University.