Certain places in Pennsylvania were hotbeds of ante-bellum social activism, and a new book makes a case for ranking Harrisburg right up there with Philadelphia.

In "Biography of an Antislavery City: Antislavery Advocates, Abolitionists, and Underground Railroad Activists in Harrisburg, PA," Lancaster resident Todd Mealy writes about the complex relationship between white and black abolitionists and contends the antislavery movement there was more about resistance than it was about hiding places associated with the Underground Railroad.

He notes numerous instances in which black and white residents of Harrisburg and its environs physically defended and financially supported those among them whom slavers sought to kidnap and sell South.

"Mealy is exceptionally effective in revealing the key but long neglected role played by Harrisburg's African Americans," says Fergus Bordewich, author of a "Bound for Canaan," a definitive book on the Underground Railroad.

In a back cover blurb, Bordewich calls Mealy's book "fascinating and exhaustive."

Mealy, who grew up in Harrisburg and teaches at Penn Manor High School, said he began his extensively researched book in 2001 as paper for a Millersville University graduate class taught by Tracy Weis.

Later, Lancaster native Matthew Pinsker, a Lincoln scholar and history professor at Dickinson College, mentored Mealy in research that took him not only to Harrisburg and Philadelphia, but to Boston and Ontario, Canada. The two men worked together on a teacher-training workshop on the Underground Railroad.

His 260-page paperback includes a 16-page chronology, going from 1727 (John Harris settles along the Susquehanna River) to 1950 (1950, W.E.B. Dubois speaks at a burial-stone ceremony for William Howard Day (printer of John Brown's constitution and recruiter of colored soldiers for the Civil War).

The book also has numerous appendices of interest, one containing Harrisburg's 1821 ordinance regarding "free persons of color," and another containing the 1836 constitution of the Harrisburg Antislavery Society. Area readers as well as scholars of the topic might wish for an index.

Mealy is now working on a master's degree in military history at Norwich University. His book is available at www.PublishAmerica.com or www.Amazon.com for $21.95.