The Invisible Line Read Online Free PDF Page A

countless ways.
    Writing about big families across generations often reminded me of my own loving extended family. My grandparents, Sidney and Beverly Sharfstein and Reuben and Pearl Shiling, loved stories and jokes and ideas and books, but most of all they loved me. I wish they were alive to see this book. I am grateful for the love, support, and friendship of my sister Sarah and Brian and baby Sydney, Yngvild and Sam and Isak, Howard and Jill, David and Claire, my in-laws Curt and Mary Mikkelsen, and Erika and Mike and Katherine. My brother Josh read the entire manuscript in one weekend during a blizzard in Baltimore in December 2009, and as always his comments were spot on, medically sound, and in the public interest. For as long as I can remember, he has been my friend and champion. I thank my father, Steven Sharfstein, not only because there was a copy of Black Skin, White Masks in the house when I was growing up, and not only because he told stories about what it was like to meet Martin Luther King Jr. and attend the March on Washington as a young man. My father has shown me how to live a socially engaged life of ideas and action. He has always put family first. And it is always fun to watch baseball with him—even when the Orioles are playing. My mother, Margaret Sharfstein, has the most acute observational skills and best sense of humor of anyone I have ever met. She has kept our family together with the kind of strength and abiding love that has its own gravitational force. I am who I am because of her.
    Since I began this project, my immediate family has doubled in size. My two boys, Saul and Abe, make every day wonderful. I see the world with new eyes because of them. That said, any inadvertent mentions in this book of dinosaurs, spiders, robots, spaceships, skeletons, pirates, and dogs that talk are entirely my own.
    When there was no end in sight, Ann Mikkelsen’s advice and encouragement, patience and unfailing support, kept this project going. She has read every word that I have written many times, and I would be lost without her wise counsel and brilliant editing. Every day for eighteen years we have spent hours talking, and every day I am inspired by her ideas and intellect and empathy, her way of reading the world closely. I understand love and family, truth and beauty, happiness and home, because of her. My gratitude is indescribable. This book is dedicated to her.

INDEX

    abolitionists:
    and civil rights
    and Congress
    and Fugitive Slave Act
    in Kentucky
    moving toward radical stance
    and Negro Exodus
    in New Haven
    in Oberlin
    Quakers
    resistance to slave-catchers
    Southern responses to
    at Yale
    see also specific names
    Adams, Marian
    African Americans:
    assimilation of
    black troops
    civil rights for
    elected officials
    enslaved, see slavery; slaves
    and Freedmen’s Bureau
    and Jim Crow era
    land for newly freed blacks
    marrying whites
    migration of
    racial ideologies regarding
    and segregation
    self-improvement of
    taxes on
    use of the law by
    violence against
    see also race, races
    Alabama
    forced migration of slaves from coastal South to
    Spanish Fort, Battle of
    American Anti-Slavery Society
    American Missionary Association
    Amistad slave revolt
    Anthony, Susan B.
    Appalachia, see Kentucky, Virginia
    Army of Tennessee
    Augusta, Alexander T.
    Austin, John

    Bacon, John
    Baldwin, Tom
    Bascom, Henry B.
    Beecher, Henry Ward
    Benjamin, Judah
    Berea, Kentucky, integrated college in
    Betsy (slave)
    Big Sandy River, Levisa fork of
    Billisoly, Eugene
    Black Codes
    Blair, Francis P.
    Blair, Henry
    Boas, Franz
    Boone, Daniel
    Bowen, Sayes Jenks
    Boynton, Shakespeare
    Bragg, Braxton
    Breckinridge, Billy
    Breckinridge, John
    Brown, John
    Bruce, Blanche
    Buckner, Simon Bolivar
    Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, see Freedmen’s Bureau
    Burns, Anthony
    Bushnell, Simeon
    Bushwhackers
    Butternuts

    Calhoun, John C.
    California, statehood of
    Cameron, Don
    Carnegie, Andrew
    Cartwright,