"With The Horrible Gift of Freedom, Marcus Wood deploys his characteristic rigor, creativity, and verve in the service of a near complete dismantling of abolitionist self-satisfaction. The cultural artifacts produced to celebrate abolition, both then and now, never have received more searching inquiry."
—Christopher L. Brown, author of Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism

"Marcus Wood, the preeminent scholar of the iconography of slavery, has written a brilliant successor to his pathbreaking book, Blind Memory. The Horrible Gift of Freedom is a necessary, vital book. Indeed, it should be required reading for anyone interested in the meanings and legacies of slavery and freedom. The prose is elegant, the analyses always penetrating and often provocative; and the result is that Wood has transformed common understandings of emancipation, highlighting the limits of freedom and offering a sober meditation on the legacy of freedom in the twenty-first century."
—John Stauffer, author of Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln

"Wood has meticulously deconstructed the devastating myth that freedom was a gift generously conferred to Africans. His book is a witty, gripping, sophisticated analysis of the racism and self-congratulation that centuries ago built narrative and pictorial falsehoods of staggering proportions; a deception, as he aptly demonstrates, still going on in the twenty-first century."
—Sylviane A. Diouf, author of Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America

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