David Cecelski Historian and Writer David Cecelski Is the Author Of

David Cecelski Historian and writer David Cecelski is the author of several award-winning books and hundreds of articles about history, race, and culture in the American South. His most recent book, The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War, was published in the spring of 2012. A native of Craven County, in the Tidewater region of North Carolina he also writes a blog for The North Carolina Folklife Institute (http://www.ncfolk.org/ncfood/) that explores the state's traditional cooking and foodways. David’s previous books include The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 2001) and a collection of environmental history essays titled A Historian’s Coast. He was also the editor, with Timothy B. Tyson, of Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy, which won an Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavis Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights. His first book, Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina, and the Fate of Black Schools in the South, continues to be a central text in the field, and he also co-edited (with Katherine Mellen Charron) an important slave narrative, William Henry Singleton’s Recollections of My Slavery Days. For five years, Dr. Cecelski contributed a regular environmental history essay to Coastwatch magazine, and his popular oral history series, “Listening to History,” recently ended a ten-year run in the Raleigh News & Observer. Dr. Cecelski has held several distinguished visiting professorships, including three stints as the Lehman Brady joint chair in Documentary and American Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and another as the Whichard Distinguished Chair in the Humanities at East Carolina University. Educated at Duke and Harvard, he is married to Dr. Laura Hanson, and they have two children, Vera and Guy. A native of the North Carolina coast, his writing has focused passionately on telling stories from his native land that illuminate American history more broadly. The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War Abraham H. Galloway (1837-70) was a fiery young slave rebel, radical abolitionist, and Union spy who rose out of bondage to become one of the most significant and stirring black leaders in the South during the Civil War. Throughout his brief, mercurial life, Galloway fought against slavery and injustice. He risked his life behind enemy lines, recruited black soldiers for the North, and fought racism in the Union army's ranks. He also stood at the forefront of an African American political movement that flourished in the Union-occupied parts of North Carolina, even leading a historic delegation of black southerners to the White House to meet with President Lincoln and to demand the full rights of citizenship. He later became one of the first black men elected to the North Carolina legislature. Long hidden from history, Galloway's story reveals a war unfamiliar to most of us. As David Cecelski writes, "Galloway's Civil War was a slave insurgency, a war of liberation that was the culmination of generations of perseverance and faith." This riveting portrait illuminates Galloway's life and deepens our insight into the Civil War and Reconstruction as experienced by African Americans in the South. .

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