"Grivno's carefully documented interpretation of rural life and labor challenges readers to think hard about the meanings of slavery, freedom, and borders in antebellum America."
The Journal of American History   "A thickly descriptive and nuanced account of the 'evolution of race, class, and labor regimes' in Maryland from just after the American Revolution up to the Civil War."
Civil War Book Review  ... Read more"Max Grivno's engaging and often harrowing narrative of agricultural workers along the northern Maryland border, investigates a place where 'slavery's roots ran shallow,' yet where free landless laborers face severe constraints in a changing market. . . . Grivno's book brilliantly succeeds in analyzing local and regional changes in terms of broader developments, portraying the distinctiveness of an understudied corner of the South."
The Journal of Southern History "Grivno's significant study speaks to a number of themes in the recent historiography of slavery and labor: the similarities and differences between slavery and freedom, the important role of the interstate slave trade, and the importance of family and household as a key to workers' means of survival and employers' influence over them. A powerful analysis of these key topics that will shape debate in the field for some time."
Christopher Clark, author of Social Change in America: From the Revolution through the Civil War "Subtle and remarkably textured history of labor in northern Maryland and southern Pennsylvania."
Southern Spaces "Grivno has rescued some folk from oblivion, put some flesh on the statistical bones of history, and shown us just how hard scraping by could be."
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography "Gleanings of Freedom shines light on an important, underappreciated site in the history of slavery and makes a lasting contribution to the study of American workers and the slave South."
American Historical Review "A splendid volume, interestingly written, engaging a broad historiography, and formulating convincing arguments concerning the evolution and racial complexity of the rural labor force."
The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society "A persuasive and powerful study of a rural labor system at a tender moment of transition. It should rightly enjoy pride of place alongside some of the best work recently published on slavery in the U.S.A."
Slavery and Abolition "Gleanings of Freedom tells a story at once wholly underappreciated and immensely important. In unprecedented detail, Max Grivno's impeccably researched study explains how slavery and freedom functioned in such close proximity and for so long. It is
and will remain
indispensable for scholars of slavery, wage labor, and the tangled history of America's antebellum working class."
Mark M. Smith, author of How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses Show Less