Wisconsin may seem like an unlikely repository for one of the richest collections of historical materials from Freedom Summer...a challenge to the very heart of the segregated South...The collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society was built thanks to the work of a handful of UW history students and the Wisconsin Historical Society Director, Lee Fishel... As "political activists making their way to academia," the students felt they had the experience and knowledge to collect documents from many of the grassroots participants in the project. Over the last two years, staff at the Historical Society have worked to digitize more than 30,000 pages from the collection and put them online for students researchers, and the general public to browse at www.wisconsinhistory.org/freedomsummer. The voices of many of these participants, and those who challenged them, are represented in...Risking Everything...Edmonds said he envisions it (the book) having a broad audience: those who participated in the event, individuals who are curious about learning more about this aspect of the civil rights movement, and university faculty who can assign it as a selection of primary sources for their students. (Kim Ukura, The Capital Times)

Not long ago, when a volunteer expressed surpise at what he discovered about the Civil Rights Movement, historian Michael Edmonds realized that the young man only knew " a children's book understanding...a sanitized version" of the movement. It 's an understanding that many Americans have.This book seeks to remedy that in a small, but monumental, way...Through eyewitness reports and information from more than 40 documents, editor Michael Edmonds brings readers an in-the-trenches look at Freedom Summer in a way you'll never get from any class. Included are letters home from Freedom workers, training manuals, essays, testimonies, transripts, photographs and curriculums; as Edmonds himself said, "No punches are pulled." (Terri Schlichenmeyer, Philadelphia Tribune)

The book is worthy for showing the complicated organization that went into the multifaceted project on a large scale and on the small scale, and the day-to-day impressions of the volunteers themselves. A letter home from Illinois student, Robert Feinglass captures his encounters with the poverty, fear, and oppression of the Mississippi residents: It is the most stimulating, satisfying work I have ever done.  Nothing is ever enough; there is no such thing as a job finished: there is only progress. We are involved here in a process of uniting, joining, becoming a mutually interested community.  The song says it well: we shall overcome. (Dina Weinstein, Jewish Book Council)


...What emerges out of the collected documents, then, is a sense that Freedom Summer leaders and participants belived that a holistic approach was necessary for political empowement of black communities...Highlights of the collection include Fannie Lou Hamer's deposition about the torture of herself and other black women by ploice officers and a Freedom Schools curriculum...Because these documents are all accessible online courtesy of the WHS, Edmond's collection would be most ideal for teaching  undergraduates, (David Ponton III, The Journal of Southern History)

Rather than relying purely on a historical narrative, this volume - expertly edited by the deputy director of the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives in Madison - provides readers with the documents, letters, and firsthand accounts produced by the people who made the Freedom Summer of 1964 possible...The documents, letters, and records organized in Risking Everything...provide a truly unique window into the intelligence, moral rectitude, and unfathomable guts shared by the ordinary civil rights workers who propelled the civil rights struggle in the 1960s. (Stephen Kercher, Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Voyageur Magazine)