Barbara McCaskill's Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory is an illuminating and richly archival account of the Crafts’ history and the role their story has played in a broader reckoning with the cultural history of enslaved people. Laying the enduring elements of their biography against the shifting cultural norms and expectations the Crafts encountered, McCaskill employs the lens of “cultural memory” to capture the ways their story has been alternately championed or overlooked within African American freedom struggles. Beginning with the assertion that “William and Ellen Craft are unforgettable,” McCaskill attributes “their rise and fall in popularity over the generations” to evolving cultural presumptions and values, particularly those governing race, gender, and sexuality. She notes that “their lives have not neatly aligned with English-speaking audiences’ assumptions about how African peoples functioned in bondage, and with the kind of man and woman they were expected to become in freedom” (5). Extending Frances Smith Foster's claim that “‘stories of African American collaboration’ … have been ‘less well known in our culture than those of the rugged individualists who succeeded against the odds’” (5), McCaskill redresses this oversight, centering the Crafts’ relationship in her examination of the impact of their experience, political projects, and story at different moments in history. Weaving together newspaper accounts, scholarly essays, biographical material, and literary and historical analysis, McCaskill blends a range of academic genres with the verve of a storyteller to produce an engaging account of the Crafts and their legacy of interest to both scholarly and popular audiences.

McCaskill understands the Crafts’ public presentation as a “balancing act of revelation and disclosure,” noting that their “intertwined story” is

This proves an apt analytic through which to consider each phase of their biography: their early lives, marriage, daring escape, harrowing time in Boston, emigration to England by way of Nova Scotia, British education; the publication history of Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, William's time as a merchant in West Africa, the couple's return to the United States in 1870, and their subsequent two decades of building and establishing a cooperative farm and school in rural Georgia.

Though the book references the primary scholarly debates on the Crafts, including the gender politics of the narrative and their speaking engagements, the visual politics surrounding the iconography of the Crafts, and the racial politics surrounding William's libel trial in Boston, McCaskill's purpose here is not to advance a particular argument about the Crafts or their specific cultural productions. It is, rather, to survey the diversity of claims and uses to which their story has been put and to secure their reputation as a couple fearlessly devoted to pursuing ever-changing – and expanding – notions of freedom together.

In addition to presenting essential information on the Crafts, the book is a case study in black feminist scholarship, offering insight into the ways an embodied engagement with the archive produces new insights. As the book's origin story, McCaskill opens with a vivid description of a day in late winter, years ago, at the end of her fellowship appointment at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, on which she has to find a notary to complete the paperwork for her new academic position at the University of Georgia. Dashing across the street from her apartment in the rain, clutching her University of Georgia-emblazoned umbrella, she has a chance encounter with a distant relative of the Crafts, who recognizes the school's colors and strikes up a conversation. The encounter echoes throughout McCaskill's methodology, which consists not only of putting historical and critical sources in conversation, but also of placing the Crafts’ contributions in the context of their family history. The book concludes with a consideration of the ways the Crafts’ ultimately failed endeavor of running a school in rural Georgia should be viewed in light of their descendants’ successes.

An indispensable crystallization of sources on the Crafts, Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery is required reading for scholars working on the couple, but it is also a widely accessible and deeply engaging account of a marriage and partnership, as well as an example of the ways accidents of fate, affections, and affinities make possible new critical horizons.