“Tomek offers a brilliant and provocative analysis of the antislavery network. By using individual Pennsylvanians, black and white, as case studies, Tomek demonstrates the enormous diversity of the political and social motivations driving schemes of colonization. Her work illuminates the interplay of idealism and pragmatism, of competition and cooperation among advocates for gradual emancipation, colonization, and immediate abolition. This work is an extraordinary contribution to the historical understanding of American colonization.”
--Orville Vernon Burton, author of Age of Lincoln

“Colonization and Its Discontents challenges historians of the antebellum period to reconsider basic questions—questions about distinctions between abolitionist versus antislavery, between immediatist versus gradualist, and between competing versions of African colonization. By concentrating on the full spectrum of antislavery ideology within a single state and by questioning long-held assumptions, Tomek offers an expansive and revealing analysis of the antislavery impulse.”
--James Brewer Stewart, James Wallace Professor of History, Emeritus, Macalester College