Frank Carlson Library

In 1848 Vienna, fifteen-year-old August Bondi is forced to emigrate to America, leaving behind his comrades in the revolution. In his new country he is confronted by the evil of slavery, and sets out for Bleeding Kansas to join forces with the notorious John Brown.

Thirteen-year-old Dana investigates a mystery involving the old Kansas house that her parents have turned into a bed and breakfast business; in a parallel story, a Quaker boy living in the house in 1857 sets out to help some fugitive slaves to freedom.

Dramatic re-enactments of incidents in Bleeding Kansas history make up this documentary about Kansans, two belief systems--freedom and slavery, and Kansas' significance in U. S. history of the time. The Battle of Black Jack, the massacre along Pottawatomie Creek, territorial elections, and John Brown's hanging following the Harpers Ferry raid are among the scenes portrayed by local re-enactors.

A town at the center of the United States becomes the site of an ongoing struggle for freedom and equality. In May, 1854, Massachusetts was in an uproar. A judge, bound by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, had just ordered a young African American man who had escaped from slavery in Virginia and settled in Boston to be returned to bondage in the South. An estimated fifty thousand citizens rioted in protest. Observing the scene was Amos Adams Lawrence,...