Liberia, July 21 -- There's a line about Liberia that gets repeated so often it has hardened into fact: alone among African nations, it was never colonized. Fred van der Kraaij doesn't buy it, and he's spent nearly 240 pages - a third of them notes, bibliography, and index - building the case against it. Liberia was colonized, he writes plainly in his introduction, just not by a European flag. It was colonized by the United States, working through a private society whose board was thick with slaveholders, using free Black Americans and freed slaves as the settlers on the ground. He lays out the paper trail in enough detail that the old myth doesn't have much room left to stand in.

Fifty Years in the Making Van der Kraaij didn't come to ...