Adams, Francis and Barry Sanders, Alienable Rights (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2003).

Alcorn, Richard, "Leadership and Stability in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America: A Case Study of an American Town" (The Journal of American History, Vol. 61, December 1974).

Anderson, William, They Died to Make Men Free: A History of the Nineteenth Michigan Infantry in the Civil War (Berrien Springs, MI: Hardscrabble Books, 1980).

Arnett, Benjamin, "The New Black Laws" in The African American Archive, Kai Wright, ed. (New York, NY" Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, 2001

Bates, Samual, History of the Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861-65, Vol. 5 (Harrisburg, PA: B. Singerly State Printers, 1869).

Berlin, Ira, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America ( Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1998).

_______, Slaves Without Masters (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1974)

Berwanger, Eugene, The Frontier Against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Slavery Extension Controversy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967).

Blight, David, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2001)

Cayton, Andrew and Peter Onuf, The Midwest and the Nation: Rethinking the History of an American Region (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

Cha-Jua, Sundiata Keita. America's First Black Town: Brooklyn, Illinois, 1830-1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

Clifton, James, The Pokagons, 1683-1983: Catholic Potowatomi Indians of the St. Joseph River Valley (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984).

Coe, David, ed., Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: Combat Diaries of Union Sergeant Hamlin Alexander Coe (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975).

Cohen, William, At Freedom's Edge (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1991).

Conzen, Katherine "Pi-ing the Type: Jane Grey Swisshelm and the Contest of Midwest Regionality," The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History, ed. Andrew Cayton and Susan Gray (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001).

Cox, Anna-Lisa, "Nineteenth-Century African Americans," The Encyclopedia of the Midwest (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005)

Cox, Thomas, This Well Wooded Land: Americans and their Forests from Colonial Times to the Present (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985).

DeVries, James, Race and Kinship in a Midwestern Town: The Black Experience in Monroe, Michigan, 1900-1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984).

Du Bois, W.E. Burghardt, "The Negro Farmer" in Department of Commerce and Labor Bureau of the Census Special Reports Supplementary Analysis and Derivative Tables, Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906.

Du Bois, W.E. Burghardt, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet Classic, 1995).

Dyer, Frederick, Compendium of the War of the Rebellion (Des Moines, IA: Dyer Publishing Co., 1908).

Dykstra, Robert, Bright Radical Star: Black Freedom and White Supremacy on the Hawkeye Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

Foner, Eric, The New American History (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1997).

_________, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1865-1877 (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1988).

Formiso, Ronald, "The Edge of Caste: Colored Suffrage in Michigan, 1827-1861" (Michigan History, Vol. 56, Spring 1972).

Franklin, John Hope and Alfred Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994)

Genser, Wallace,'A Rigid Government Over Ourselves:' Transformations in Ethnic, Gender, and Race Consciousness on the Northern Borderlands - Michigan, 1805 -1865 (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1998).

Gerber, David, Black Ohio and the Color Line: 1860-1915. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976).

Gray, Susan, The Yankee West: Community Life on the Michigan Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

Heinegg, Paul, Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware, (webpage publication: http://www.freeafricanamericans.com).

Hesslink, George K. Black Neighbors: Negroes in a Northern Rural Community (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1968).

Horton, James and Lois, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern Free Blacks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Jelks, Randal, Race, Respectability, and the Struggle for Civil Rights: A Study of the African American Community of Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1870-1954 (Ph.D. Diss: Michigan State University, 1999)

Katchun, Mitch, Festivals of Freedom (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003).

Kirkland, Caroline, A New Home, Who'll Follow?, edited by Sandra Zaggarell (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990).

Lind, Michael, What Lincoln Believed (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2004) Litwack,

Leon, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1961).

_______, Been in the Storm So Long (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1980).

_______, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1999).

Loewen, James, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York, NY: New Press, 2005)

Mason, Phillip and Paul Pentecost, From Bull Run to Appomatox: Michigan's Role in the Civil War (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1961).

McCaul, Robert, The Black Struggle for Public Schooling in Nineteenth-Century Illinois (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University, 1987).

Padgett, Chris, " Evangelicals Divided: Abolition and the Plan of Union's Demise in Ohio's Western Reserve" in Religion and the Antebellum Debate over Slavery, John McKivigan and Michael Snay, eds. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998)

Painter, Nell Irvin, Sojourner Truth, a Life, A Symbol (New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 1996).

Payne, Charles M., I've Got the Light of Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

Reynolds, David, John Brown: Abolitionist (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).

Robertson, Jno, Michigan in the War (Lansing, MI: W.S. George and Co., State Binders and Printers, 1882).

Robinson, Marilynne, The Death of Adam (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998).

Sarno, Pearl, A Look at Covert's History (South Haven, Michigan: Sarno, 1976).

Satz, Ronald, "Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era: The Old Northwest as a Test Case," Michigan History (Vol. 60, 1976).

Sawyer, Marcia, "Surviving Freedom: African American Farm Households in Cass County, Michigan, 1832-1880" (Ph.D. Diss., Michigan State University, 1990).

Sexton, Jessie Ethelyn, Congregationalism, Slavery, and the Civil War, Lansing, MI: Michigan Civil War Centennial Observance Commission, 1966).

Smith, David and Cornell West eds., Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History, Vol. 4 Jack Salzman, (New York, NY: MacMillan Library Reference, 1996).

Squibb, John, "Roads to Plessy: Blacks and the Law in the Old Northwest: 1860-1896," (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1992).

Standard Atlas of Van Buren County, Michigan (Chicago: Geo. A. Ogle & Co., 1912).

Stephenson, Gilbert, Race Distinctions in American Law (New York, NY: Negro Universities Press, 1969).

Stewart, Roma Jones, "The Migration of a Free People," Michigan History, (Vol. 71, 1987).

Tanner, Helen Hornbook, ed. Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987).

Thornbrough, Emma Lou, The Negro in Indiana: A Study of a Minority (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1957).

Trudeau, Noah, Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1862-1865 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1998).

Vander Velde, Lewis, "The Michigan Supreme Court Define Negro Rights, 1866-1869," Michigan Perspectives: People, Events, and Issues, ed. Alan Brown, John Houdek, and John Yzenbaard (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1974).

Vincent. Stephen, Southern Seed, Northern Soil: African American Farm Communities In the Midwest, 1765-1900 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1999).

Voegeli, V. Jacque, Free But Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro During the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).

Waite, Cally, "The Segregation of Black Students at Oberlin College after Reconstruction," (History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 3, 2001).

Walker, Juliet, Free Frank: A Black Pioneer in the Antebellum Frontier (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983).

White, Richard, The Middle Ground (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Williams, Loretta J. Williams, Black Freemasonry and Middle-Class Realities (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1980).

Wilson, Benjamin, A Rural Black Heritage Between Chicago and Detroit: 1850 - 1929 (Kalamazoo, Michigan: New Issues Press, Western Michigan University, 1985).

NOTE: All photographs on the website used with permission from the Covert Museum.