| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

North Star Country: Upstate New York and the Crusade for African American Freedom. By Milton C. Sernett. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002. xxii, 369 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8156-2914-1. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8156-2915-X.)

The North Star that inspired the fugitive slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass to publish his eponymous weekly in Rochester beginning in December 1847 apparently infused others also to make central and western New York not merely home but a haven for blacks and a hotbed of abolitionism. Returning to the scene of his earlier triumphs in works such as Abolition's Axe: Beriah Green, Oneida Institute, and the Black Freedom Struggle (1986), Milton C. Sernett christens the region "North Star Country." Its boundaries blend into an amorphous "Upstate New York" centered from Utica to Rochester but ranging from Troy to Buffalo. Under the moniker "Burned-over District," the extended, indefinite region reveled in radicalism, revivalism, and utopian experiments from America's Second Great Awakening of the 1820s to William Miller's millennialism and Sylvester Graham's health evangelism, both of the 1830s and early 1840s. It was there Joseph Smith professed to find the stones of The Book of Mormon, which he published in 1830. It hosted John Humphrey Noyes's Oneida Community, founded in 1848, and Ellen G. White's Seventh-day Adventists, founded in 1863. And, Sernett argues, it shifted the epicenter of antislavery away from New England and the circle of Boston.

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