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In the days before most people could vote or register protest in formal ways, many of them voted with their feet. To escape slavery, coercion, abuse, and unhappiness, all kinds of individuals took to the road and departed, sometimes with a few meager items of clothing and food, sometimes entirely empty-handed. Their stories are by turns exciting, painful, shocking, poignant, and revealing. Some people fled with friends and family, others disappeared on their own. Some left to join the military or pirate ships (occasionally cross-dressing to do so); some deserted the military itself. Many other people tried to find these individuals and bring them back, sometimes exacting terrible punishments for the crime of seeking freedom. How can those who liberated themselves help us to understand the nature of oppression, its enduring power, and the varieties of responses and resistance to it? This First-Year Seminar focuses on early America, and in particular individuals, enslaved and free, who liberated themselves from slavery, indentures, unhappy marriages, and an array of bad situations. Some of the most famous early Americans, such as Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass in Maryland, liberated themselves; some of the most famous early Americans, such as George Washington, sought to bring self-emancipating people back home. Some of those who absconded ended up very far from home. This seminar considers both well-known and obscure stories of self-liberation around the world, following the trails blazed by these courageous, risk-taking people. We will follow, too, the trails they generated in archives as we try to understand what drove them, and how they fared. Students will have a chance to investigate such individuals and institutions for themselves using an array of historical documents, thereby learning invaluable research and presentation skills.