Scott Shane

Many thanks

The Writings of Thomas Smallwood by Thomas Smallwood: 9780143138389 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books A long-forgotten Black abolitionist who liberated captive workers by the wagonload, brilliantly satirized slaveholders, and gave the underground railroad its name. Thomas Smallwood was a shoemaker by...

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Special thanks to Henry Louis Gates Jr., who encountered my book FLEE NORTH, in which Smallwood is the central character, and recruited me to edit Smallwood's work and write an introduction for an addition to his series of African American classics. Link: 6/

In these newspaper pieces Smallwood gave the underground railroad its name, using that imaginary form of transport to mock the enslavers who were baffled at the sudden disappearance of their human property. Smallwood later wrote a short memoir describing his escape operation. 5/

He took his pseudonym from a favorite Charles Dickens character, and wrote what I believe to be the only accounts of escapes from slavery written by an organizer and published contemporaneously. They are a literary and journalistic masterpiece. 4/

The result was a series of satirical dispatches for an abolitionist newspaper in Albany, sometimes scathing, sometimes hilarious, using the real names of the people escaping and of the slaveholders, whose crimes he exposed and whose moral failures he lambasted. 3/

As if is wasn't enough to be running a shoemaking business in Washington, DC, raising a family and spending every spare minute in the dangerous business of helping men, women and children to freedom by the wagonload, Smallwood decided to write about the escapes, too. 2/

I'm really pleased to announce that The Writings of Thomas Smallwood is out today from @penguinclassicsusa.bsky.social s. I collected all the writings I could find by this unsung organizer of mass escapes from slavery in the 1840s, and they are remarkable. (Link follows this thread). 1/

I stumbled upon the amazing Thomas Smallwood while researching the domestic slave trade. He liberated more of the enslaved than the great Harriet Tubman, wrote newspaper dispatches about the escapes mocking enslavers, and he gave the underground railroad its name. Yet he's little known.

If I were about to capitulate to Vladimir Putin, as Trump and Vance seem to be, it might seem like a good tactic to pick a public fight with Putin's adversary. It might distract at least a few Americans from how "peace through strength" has become peace through abject weakness.

Objective Troy by Scott Shane: 9780804140317 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books Objective Troy tells the gripping and unsettling story of Anwar al-Awlaki, the once-celebrated American imam who called for moderation after 9/11, a man who ultimately directed his outsized...

Awlaki's remarkable story -- his talents, his radicalization, the radical response of the US government in killing him, his online afterlife -- seems to me to capture the twists and ironies of the post-9/11 era. You can see if you agree: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/236340...

Anwar was not even religious, let alone a jihadist. It was about 17 years later that he joined Al Qaeda and began his plotting. So USAID -- which certainly should have discovered his falsified birthplace -- could hardly have predicted that he would one day become a terrorist.

Of course, in 1990, when USAID gave Anwar al-Awlaki money to pay for his engineering degree at Colorado State University, he was a promising teenager and the son of a prominent Yemeni citizen who cherished his years as a student and professer in the US.

In recent days, Fox News, The New York Post and lots of others have seized on this document to bolster the Trump-Musk campaign against USAID, saying (as Fox put it) that “USAID reportedly bankrolled al Qaeda terrorist's college tuition.”

The very first document was part of Anwar al-Awlaki's application to USAID for a college scholarship. I noted that Awlaki had falsified his birthplace, claiming to have been born in Yemen and not the US, in order to get a tuition grant reserved for foreign citizens.

I told this story in my 2015 book, OBJECTIVE TROY: A Terrorist, A President and the Rise of the Drone. When it was published, I posted at the National Security Archive a collection of documents.

In 2011, after a Justice Department opinion advised President Obama that it was legal to put a US citizen on the kill list, a US drone strike killed Awlaki. His "martyrdom" hugely increased his influence, and he posthumously inspired dozens of deadly terror attacks in the west.

He became the leading voice for Al Qaeda in English, reaching a huge audience via YouTube and his own website. He coached the so-called underwear bomber, helped plant bombs on caargo planes, and generally tried his best to kill Americans.

Anwar al-Awlaki was an American-born Islamic cleric who became prominent in the US in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, explaining Islam to Americans via major media outlets. He later moved to England and grew steadily more radical, finally joining Al Qaeda in Yemen.

The Anwar al-Awlaki File, Explained Update - February 14, 2025Washington, D.C., February 14, 2025 - Some 14 years after Anwar al-Awlaki's death in an American drone strike, the Al Qaeda terrorist has become the unlikely subject of a flu...

It's been interesting to watch pro-Trump media attack USAID based on a document that I posted online years ago. I'll write a thread with the basics, but the full story just went up on the invaluable National Security Archive
@NSArchive
site here: nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-boo...

A truly astonishing statistic. Come on, Elon, take a break from tweeting and give it a try!

Thanks to the NYT Book Review for the shout-out for my book FLEE NORTH in its Paperback Row column! Just in time for last-minute holiday giving....And to Gabrielle Dean of Johns Hopkins University for her quite moving account of what she chose as her favorite read of 2024. Many thanks to her!

For some folks the link at scottshane.org is mysteriously not working. If you have trouble try the Reviews link in the last post!

Weird. Works fine for me! I'll do some checking

But mostly, folks have kindly told me FLEE NORTH is a great read about the darkest American history and its unsung heroes. Maybe that got it on the best-of-2023 lists of Publishers Weekly, Amazon, The New Yorker, AARP and more. Reviews here: scottshane.org/reviews. Thanks, all!

Many readers learned for the first time about the domestic slave trade, which made huge profits by forcing 1 million people to the deep south between 1808 and the Civil War. Such sales tore families apart, separating wives from husbands, parents from children – usually forever.

Most readers are stunned that they’ve never heard of Thomas Smallwood, born into slavery, who bought his freedom and repeatedly risked his life to help hundreds escape. He wrote about the escapes in scathing, hilarious newspaper dispatches – and gave the underground railroad its name.

The paperback of my book FLEE NORTH is out today (new cover!), and I’m grateful to readers who have told me what they value in the book -- a lot of hugely rewarding conversations for me. (Need a gift for a history lover? Options to buy the book, including on audio, are here: scottshane.org.)