Wilma King is Arvarh E. Strickland Distinguished Professor in African-American History and Culture at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where she holds a joint appointment in the Black Studies Program and Department of History. Her books include The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women during the Slave Era; We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible: A Reader in Black Women's History (edited with Darlene Clark Hine and Linda Reed); A Northern Woman in the Plantation South: Letters of Tryphena Blanche Holder Fox, 1856-1876; Children of the Emancipation; and Toward the Promised Land: From Uncle Tom's Cabin to the Onset of the Civil War, 1851-1861.