standard.

about 20 years ago i was doing research on my first book about african-american women in the north and i came across an advertisement for a hundredway, and enslaved person who had run from the president's house in philadelphia. may 1796. and i was sort of caught up looking through microfilm and old newspapers and this made me pause and i said, wait, who is this person who ran away? she was named only judge in the advertisement. i thought, wait a minute, i don't know this person and that was troubleing to me. this miss area of expertise and i had no idea who that's owny

judge was. and there was something that was very sort of compelling about this advertisement, never sort of escaped me. and i said, you know, i'm going to come back those important story and try to trace this woman. i need answers. so i finished the first book and here i am. man years later. was a lengthy processy attempting to recover the life ona judge and those who do specifically early african-american history, doing this kind of work in archives where the evidence is slim, factual evidence often doesn't exist because people of color, women in particular, often remained outside of the archives.

and so what i will say is that there's absolutely no way i could have written this book had i not written my first book. that's my plug for graduate students and people who are really doing the work of academics. i needed a grounding in order to be able to write this book about a woman who is really just absolutelying me nave -- magnificent. when you read the book you'll be blown away by her life. people in this room and at mt. vernon, this is no new story. we know about ona judge and you're among a small group of people who now i hope there are many more -- who know her. i want her name to become one of those sort of household names, like a fred douglass, harriet

tubman because she runs away. my tighting "never caught" my first which is of the tile and people the publishers hated it. i said, gives away the story, erica. and i said, yeah, but so does "12 years a slave." we understand, right? it was 12 years, going tend to at some opinion. with "never caught" this ahistory of how a woman who was a fugitive, never found freedom. she was never free. she simply was never caught. and i think it's a big distinction and one that i wanted to make, especially as i was trying to kind of dismantle what we think about slavery in the south and the north at this moment where the nation is new, and i think that's one of the

other things i was really trying to do with this book was to allow us to see what the early days of this new country looked like through the eyes of the enslaved. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> i get to take your speech to see if you really know what is going on. good afternoon. welcome to the heritage foundation and our douglas and sarah allison auditorium. we join who are joining us on the heritage.org so it and c-span in the future and i have the liberty bells with us here today, too.