The seminal nature of the transatlantic sojourn of Frederick Douglass is now acknowledged by all but the most one-eyed of African American studies scholars and Alasdair Pettinger's groundbreaking work on Douglass in Scotland from the late 1990s has been pivotal to that movement. It seems utterly mind-blowing that W. L. Andrews's otherwise excellent Oxford Frederick Douglass (1995) brought out in the 150th anniversary of the trip to Britain and Ireland contained not one letter or speech from the visit. Pettinger's masterly study of his epochal visit to Scotland fills in some of those gaps with a comprehensively researched treatment of topics such as phrenology, his interest in photography, blackface minstrelsy and centrally the Free Church of Scotland and Douglass's “Send Back the Money” campaign that was so important to his maturation as an independent political figure. Pettinger is not content, though, with merely repeating the old platitudes highlighting how, far from being a financial success, this campaign was much more important in propaganda terms, linking it to the later antiapartheid boycotts in Scotland in the 1980s. Furthermore, in describing the travels in the American South of the Free Church leader George Lewis, he gives him credit for his sensitive and nuanced understanding of black religion. There is much talk of the literary legacy, with discussions of Douglass's relation to the lives and works of Robert Burns and Walter Scott, which led him to a Celtophilia that at times undermined his judgement of Scottish faults. His love of Scotland and the Scottish people was reciprocal and the campaign he waged against the Free Church's accommodation with southern slavery is discussed here showing the way he galvanized mill workers in Dundee as well as Quaker ladies in Edinburgh. These Quaker ladies allegedly helped Douglass carve his slogan “Send Back the Money” with a spade onto the grassy slopes of Arthur's Seat. His campaign for emancipation galvanized them to think about their own entrapment in “gilded cages,” and Pettinger's discussion of letters from Mary Cunningham and an anonymous female correspondent shows how important Douglass's liberatory talk was to their political maturation and to the growth of nascent feminisms. Elsewhere, in discussing minstrelsy, Pettinger is not afraid to describe how Douglass uses some of its conventions, such as the stage Irishman, to make his performative rhetoric work more effectively. Moreover, as Pettinger discusses, it is this rhetorical skill and his very difference that attract such large audiences. Douglass is intensely self-aware about this as he writes from Dundee in 1846, “It is quite an advantage to be a ‘nigger’ here. I find I am hardly black enough for British taste, but by keeping my hair as woolly as possible, I make out to pass for at least half a negro at any rate” (209). Douglass would reflect back on Scotland for the rest of his life and he made a tremendous mark through his speaking tour and his engagement with political struggle there. Despite this, as Pettinger admits, there has been more attention to his earlier visit to Ireland and it has led to quantitavely more contemporary cultural interpretations of his sojourn there than in Scotland. The Our Bondage and Our Freedom project from Edinburgh University in 2018–19, with an exhibition in the National Library of Scotland and accompanying trails round the city and outreach to other towns and cities in which he spoke, will hopefully make right this anomaly which this book does so much to counter. Pettinger asks the rhetorical questions, “Is there a place for him in the gap between Scottish historiography (which ignores Douglass) and Douglass studies in the United States (which has little to say about Scotland)” (299)? This book provides the resounding answer: Douglass's liberating sojourn alters complacent historiography in Scotland that refuses a black presence and simultaneously undermines nativist and narrow America-first approaches to African American history.