Drawn from the work of award-winning Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland, Families and Freedom tells the story of the remaking of the black family during the tumultuous years of the Civil War era. Through the dramatic and moving letters and testimony of freed enslaved persons, the documents in Families and Freedom provide deep insight into the most intimate aspects of the transformation of captives to free people. This book is the sequel to the 1994 Lincoln Prize winner Free at Last, which was described in the New York Times as "this generation's most significant encounter with the American past."