The latest edition of Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years pays homage to the great African American intellectual Frederick Douglass in the recent bicentennial anniversary of his birth. Dickson J. Preston revisits the life of one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century to provide a refreshing perspective on Douglass’s scholarship. This biographical account carefully depicts the first twenty years of life of a young Douglass who was forging his indomitable personality under the yoke of slavery in Maryland. While the biographical foundations of the study are drawn from Douglass’s three autobiographies—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881)—the small details and unintentional incongruences are polished by Preston in a conscientious task of, as the biographer describes it, “historical detective work” (xvi). The misspelling of names, the misstated dates, and...
University of California Press