Slavery, enslaved persons and abolition of slavery Books

Book SynopsisThe Woman of Colour is a unique literary account of a black heiress' life immediately after the abolition of the British slave trade. Olivia Fairfield, the biracial heroine and orphaned daughter of a slaveholder, must travel from Jamaica to England, and as a condition of her father's will either marry her Caucasian first cousin or become dependent on his mercenary elder brother and sister-in-law. As Olivia decides between these two conflicting possibilities, her letters recount her impressions of Britain and its inhabitants as only a black woman could record them. She gives scathing descriptions of London, Bristol, and the British, as well as progressive critiques of race, racism, and slavery. The narrative follows her life from the heights of her arranged marriage to its swift descent into annulment and destitution, only to culminate in her resurrection as a self-proclaimed "widow" who flouts the conventional marriage plot.The appendices, which include contemporary reviews of the novel, historical documents on race and inheritance in Jamaica, and examples of other women of colour in early British prose fiction, will further inspire readers to rethink issues of race, gender, class, and empire from an African woman's perspective.Trade Review“This exemplary edition of The Woman of Colour, with its abundant historical context, explores vital interconnections of race, gender, and class. Its rich contribution to the debate about cultural identity and colonial power marks it as a classic.” — Moira Ferguson, University of Missouri Kansas City“Women of colour in eighteenth-century literature have become a ‘spectral presence,’ pushed into the invisibility of darkness, their voices unread or ignored. Now what has been in darkness is restored to light, as Olivia Fairfield can be heard anew. Born in Jamaica into a society in which one of her parents had enslaved the other, she is forced by law and custom to travel to the heart of colonial darkness in England itself. In a manner ‘polite yet aggressive,’ she makes her voice heard.” — Lise Winer, McGill UniversityTable of ContentsAppendix A: Lucy Peacock, “The Creole” (1786)Appendix B: Anonymous poem “written by a Mulatto Woman” (1794)Appendix C: Minor Heiresses of Color in British Long Prose Fiction Agnes Musgrave, Solemn Injunction (1798) Jane Austen, Fragment of a Novel (1817) Edmund Marshall, Edmund and Eleonora (1797) Robert Bissett, Douglas; or, The Highlander (1800) Mrs. Charles Mathews, Memoirs of a Scots Heiress (1791) Appendix D: Historical and Social Accounts of People of Color in Jamaica Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1799) Edward Long, The History of Jamaica (1774) J.B. Moreton, West India Customs and Manners (1793) Appendix E: People of Color in British Epistolary Narratives Richard Griffith, The Gordian Knot (1769) Hester Thrale, “Letter to Mrs. Pennington” (1802) Clara Reeve, Plans of Education (1792) Appendix F: The Woman of Colour: Contemporary Reviews The British Critic (March 1810) The Critical Review (May 1810) The Monthly Review (June 1810) Appendix G: Jamaican Petitions, Votes of the Assembly, and an Englishman’s Will From Votes of the Honourable House of Assembly of Jamaica (1792) From Andrew Wright’ “Last Will and Testament” (1806) Select Bibliography

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Book SynopsisEnslaved West Indian women had few opportunities to record their stories for posterity. Yet from their dusty footprints and the umpteen small clues they left for us to unravel, there's no question that they earned their place in history. Pick any Caribbean island and you'll find race, skin colour and rank interacting with gender in a unique and often volatile way. In A Kick in the Belly, Stella Dadzie follows the evidence, and finds women played a distinctly female role in the development of a culture of slave resistance - a role that was not just central, but downright dynamic.From the coffle-line to the Great House, enslaved women found ways of fighting back that beggar belief. Whether responding to the horrendous conditions of plantation life, the sadistic vagaries of their captors or the 'peculiar burdens of their sex', their collective sanity relied on a highly subversive adaptation of the values and cultures they smuggled with them naked from different parts of Africa. By sustaining or adapting remembered cultural practices, they ensured that the lives of chattel slaves retained both meaning and purpose. A Kick in the Belly makes clear that their subtle acts of insubordination and their conscious acts of rebellion came to undermine the very fabric and survival of West Indian slavery.Trade Reviewreview for Heart of the Race: A feminist classic -- Bernardine Evaristo * Times Literary Supplement *review for Heart of the Race: As relevant as ever . Heart of the Race gives a huge amount of insight into black women's agency and activism in British history. * Institute of Race Relations *review for Heart of the Race: Vivid * National Geographic Traveller *In clear, accessible prose, this book upturns versions of the past that privilege his-story, revealing a more complex and many-layered past, one in which enslaved women were central to the struggle for freedom. -- Suzanne Scafe, co-author of The Heart of the RaceShocking, enlightening, fascinating, challenging, A Kick in the Belly reframes the overwhelmingly male perspective on the transatlantic slave trade through female experiences and acts of resistance. It is a essential corrective to centuries of sublimation and the presentation of black women who lived through this history as passive victims. I cannot recommend it highly enough. -- Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, OtherStella Dadzie has given us another chapter in women's history by uncovering resistance that is uniquely rooted in controlling reproduction. This is a meticulously researched narrative that privileges the people who were so brutally treated that it was easy to assume they had no agency. We now know that such an assumption would be mistaken. This is an essential addition to the corpus of historical study into the nature, legacy and impacts of the period of African enslavement. It's finally a work that allows us to better understand and recognise how women disrupted the principal economic principles supporting the enslavement of generations of people. -- Arike Oke, Director of The Black Cultural ArchivesWhat has become distinctive of Dadzie's scholarship is the way she centres black women in their own stories and this continues in A Kick in the Belly...After being fed narratives that 'the material doesn't exist', A Kick in the Belly shows that it is really a matter of knowing where to look and how to listen. -- Sarah Lusack * Black Ballad *Amplifies and honours the innovative ways women fought for freedom and kept their cultures alive despite the brutality they faced...When filmmaker Ava DuVernay says she is her ancestor's wildest dreams, these are the women she's talking about. -- Sharmaine Lovegrove * Red *Highlighting the experiences of enslaved women in the Anglo-Caribbean, Dadzie gives primacy, as she did in her seminal book Heart of the Race (with Beverley Bryan and Suzanne Scafe), to Black women's voices. In doing so, she puts a narrative of empowerment and hope at the centre of the brutal history of slavery. -- Meleisa Ono-George * Times Literary Supplement *Transatlantic slavery is one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented periods of history. Stella Dadzie offers a much-needed corrective by centring on the experiences of black women forced into the plantation system. -- Kehinde Andrews * BBC History Magazine: Books of the Year 2020 *Over 200 or so pages of impassioned prose, [Dadzie] delves into the many stories of female freedom fighters, from Jamaica's Queen Nanny of the Maroons, who used guerrilla warfare against the British, to those who murdered their masters with poisoned draughts like Baby of St Kitts, or became runaways like Betty, Charlotte and Molly who took flight as a trio from their Barbados plantation. -- Angela Cobbinah * Camden New Journal *

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Book SynopsisThoughtful and challenging, this book argues for a reassessment of the role historically played by Islam in Africa, and offers new hope for in creased mutual understanding between African people of different faiths. Drawing on a wealth of sources, from the colonial period to the most up-to-date scholarship, the author challenges the widely held perception th at, while Christianity oppressed and subjugated the African people, Islam fitted comfortably into the indigenous landscape. Instead, this penetrating account reveals Muslim settlers to be as guilty of enforcing slavery and conversion as those of their more maligned sister tradition. Only with an acknowledgement of the true roles of both faiths in African history, suggests Azumah, can the people of both traditions move themselves and their continent towards a new future of tolerance and self-awareness.Table of Contents1. A glance at Post-Colonial Assessment of the Western-Christian and Arab-Islamic Legacies in Tropical Africa; Definition of the Problem; A Critique of Prevailing Approaches and Perceptions; Methodology, Outline and Sources. 2. Indigenous Africa as a Cultivating Ground for Arab-Islam; Introduction; The Introduction of Islam to Tropical Africa; The Indigenous African Environment and Conversion to Islam; Conclusion. 3. Muslim Jihad and Black Africa; Introduction; Sunni Muslim Doctrine of JihadJihad - Theories and Campaigns in Africa; Interpreting the Jihad Tradition in Africa; Evaluating the Jihadists' Shari`a Rule; Conclusion. 4. Muslim Slavery and Black Africa; Introduction Slavery in Muslim Africa - Indigenous or Islamic Stimuli?; Classical Muslim Ideology of Enslavement; Muslim Slavery and the Slave Trade - The Arab-Oriental; Dimension; Muslim Slavery and the Slave Trade - The African Dimension; The Various Roles of Slaves in Muslim Lands; The Condition of Slaves in Muslim Lands - Theory versus Practice; Encountering the Encounters - Arab-Islamand Black African Experience; Introduction; Truth, Dialogue and Confessional Loyalty; The Need to Rethink Arab-Islam in Light of the African; Experience; The Arab Factor in Sunni Islamic Orthodoxy.

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Book SynopsisAugust 2019 saw numerous commemorations of the year 1619, when what was said to be the first arrival of enslaved Africans occurred in North America. Yet in the 1520s, the Spanish, from their imperial perch in Santo Domingo, had already brought enslaved Africans to what was to become South Carolina. The enslaved people quickly defected to local Indigenous populations, and compelled their captors to flee. Deploying such illuminating research, The Dawning of the Apocalypse is a riveting revision of the “creation myth” of settler colonialism and how the United States was formed. Here, Gerald Horne argues forcefully that, in order to understand the arrival of colonists from the British Isles in the early seventeenth century, one must first understand the “long sixteenth century”—from 1492 until the arrival of settlers in Virginia in 1607. During this prolonged century, Horne contends, “whiteness” morphed into “white supremacy,” and allowed England to co-opt not only religious minorities but also various nationalities throughout Europe, thus forging a muscular bloc that was needed to confront rambunctious Indigenes and Africans. In retelling the bloodthirsty story of the invasion of the Americas, Horne recounts how the fierce resistance by Africans and their Indigenous allies weakened Spain and enabled London to dispatch settlers to Virginia in 1607. These settlers laid the groundwork for the British Empire and what became the United States of America.

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Book SynopsisMy Story: Mary Prince is the incredible true story of the first Blackwoman and former slave to have her life story printed in theUnited Kingdom.

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"[A] revelatory investigation . . . Like Annette Gordon-Reed’s Pulitzer-winning The Hemingses of Monticello, Greenidge illuminates the dynamic of racial subordination within a slaveholding family . . . brilliant." -- Elizabeth Taylor, National Book Critics Circle"An ambitious book, not only because of its large cast of characters, but because it offers so many insights about racial strife in the United States . . . Greenidge provides a consummate cartography of racial trauma, demonstrating through an adept use of the family’s letters, diaries and other archival materials, how the physical and emotional abuses of slavery traveled through generations long after abolition . . . There is plenty of little-known American history in The Grimkes . . . An intimate and provocative account of a family’s intergenerational struggle to remake itself. [Greenidge] takes the Grimke sisters off their pedestal so that we understand them as pieces of a tapestry that could only be sewn in America. Pain, guilt and yearning lie at the seams, holding the family together and tearing it apart." -- Michael P. Jeffries, New York Times Book Review, cover review"Sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke were two of America’s most well-known abolitionists, inspired to speak out against slavery by their Quaker faith. But the story of their family goes even deeper – their brother was a cruel sadist who fathered three children with an enslaved woman. Historian Kerri K. Greenidge digs deep into the history of the family, both its white and Black members, and the result is a fascinating examination of the legacy of slavery in America. This beautifully written book isn’t just important; it’s actually essential." -- Michael Schaub, NPR, Best Books of 2022"[T]he historical record offers occasional glimpses into the tortured dynamics of families ‘Black and white.’ Annette Gordon-Reed’s acclaimed work on Jefferson ranks as one of the most notable of these explorations. But the history of another southern lineage, which Kerri K. Greenidge examines in her new book, The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family, is perhaps even more revealing of the way human bondage shaped and deformed families, as well as the lives of those within them. . . . [Greenidge] highlights the crucial role of Black women in the abolitionist struggle . . . In recent years, considerable attention has been directed by scholars of history and literature to the question of slavery’s ‘afterlife,’ to the assessment of its impact long after its legal demise. Greenidge embraces this perspective as she connects the injustices of the present with their roots. She finds their origins embedded not just in the strictures of society and law, but in the human psychology formed in the families that racism has so profoundly shaped. Our nation’s racial trauma lives on." -- Drew Gilpin Faust - The Atlantic"[A]n ambitious cross-generational biography that provides a scintillating panorama of slavery, protest, and race relations in nineteenth- century America . . . an illuminating account of the rift between women’s rights and advocacy for African Americans . . . The Grimkes is a sobering reminder that progress on race relations has been a tortuous journey, with spurts forward, reversals, and restarts. Prejudice was not unidirectional. It swept in crosscurrents and created many conflicts. The American story is not just the oft-told one of white versus Black. It’s also a story about African Americans excluding other African Americans, about social reformers pitted against one another, about marginalized people struggling to advance and sometimes succeeding while leaving others behind." -- David S. Reynolds - New York Review of Books"An eminent African American historian skewers one of our most entrenched white-savior myths: the Grimké sisters of South Carolina, whose pioneering work on abolition masked deep familial hypocrisies. An adroit storyteller, Greenidge mines archives in her exposé of Sarah and Angelina Grimké, the erasure of their Black relatives, and the subtle yet resilient relations cobbled together in the shadows of slavery . . . a disquieting tale, inconvenient truths that strike at the shibboleths of race, gender, and power." -- Oprah Daily, "Best Books of 2022""A perfect gift for “Finding Your Roots” fans. Following the Civil War, sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke — prominent abolitionists raised in South Carolina — learned that they had three mixed-race nephews whose mother had been enslaved. The relationship became well known, glossing over tensions and traumas that come to the fore in Greenidge’s rich, illuminating narrative. The Tufts professor uses one family’s history to tell a gripping American story that spans cities — including Boston — and centuries, ending with an unforgettable figure of the Harlem Renaissance." -- Marie Morris, Boston Globe, Best Books of 2022"[A] brilliant new book . . . Greenidge is an especially elegant writer, and an admirably clear one, expertly guiding readers through a century of history and a dauntingly complicated cast of characters. She manages to sketch them all with great sympathy and at the same time utterly clear and unsparing judgment. This book will, I think, make some readers uncomfortable. It’s worth it. The Grimkes is by turns heartbreaking, entertaining, and thought-provoking: a triumph." -- Kate Tuttle - Boston Globe"Gripping . . . Greenidge digs deeply into the family’s archives to reveal their complex and often severe treatment of their nephews." -- Barbara Spindel - Christian Science Monitor"Remarkable . . . Excavating voluminous archives of slave records, correspondence, articles from the Black and mainstream presses, and speeches, Greenidge, a Tufts University professor, delves into the complexity of the Grimke family with a fresh and illuminating perspective . . . Greenidge notes that while white reformers might have disavowed ‘their complicity in America’s racial project […] Black descendants rarely enjoyed the privilege of ignoring history.’ Thanks to her tenacious scholarship, a much clearer picture of that history is unearthed and put into focus." -- Elaine Elinson - Los Angeles Review of Books"Tufts University historian Greenidge (Black Radical) delivers a revelatory study of the Grimke family and their complicated involvement in the fight for racial equality. Quaker sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke, suffering from spiritual guilt over slavery—yet willing to receive financial support from their slaveholding relatives—relocated from Charleston, S.C., to Philadelphia in the 1820s and became influential abolitionists and women’s rights activists who emphasized the detrimental effects of the “peculiar institution” on white women’s souls. After the Civil War, they learned that their brother Henry had fathered three sons by an enslaved woman, and Greenidge incisively details how the sisters’ relationships with their nephews, Archibald, Francis, and John Grimke, got tangled up in assumptions of white privilege and assertions of Black freedom.... Greenidge offers no tidy or optimistic conclusions about the long shadow of slavery, but readers will be riveted by how she brings these complex figures and their era to life. This is a brilliant and essential history." -- Publishers Weekly, starred review"Award-winning historian Greenidge offers an absorbing investigation of two branches of the notable Grimke family: sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke, who became famous for their views on abolition and women’s suffrage; and the descendants of their brother Henry Grimke, a “notoriously violent and sadistic” slave owner who fathered three sons with a Black woman he owned.... Greenidge reveals the significant roles of Black women in the family’s complicated history: the sons’ mother, wives, and in-laws; and, notably, Archie [Grimke]’s daughter, poet and playwright Angelina Weld Grimke. The author’s discoveries reveal both “white reformers’ disavowal of their complicity in America’s racial project” and “the limits of interracial alliances.” A sweeping, insightful, richly detailed family and American history." -- Kirkus Reviews, starred review"As historian Greenidge makes abundantly clear, the Grimkes remained mired in racism and classism, and their dedication to eradicating slavery had more to do with gratifying their own Christian views than with actually helping Black people...A sobering and timely look at how self-centered 'benevolence' can become complicity." -- Booklist, starred review

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Book SynopsisNAMED A TOP BOOK OF 2024 BY AMAZON AND WASHINGTON POSTThe Survivors of the Clotilda, a comprehensive account of one of the most important parts of American history, is a triumph.?Booklist (starred review)A welcome history of defiance and survival.?Kirkus ReviewsJoining the ranks of Rebecca Skloot?s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Zora Neale Hurston?s rediscovered classic Barracoon, an immersive and revelatory history of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on US soil, told through the stories of its survivors?the last documented survivors of any slave ship?whose lives diverged and intersected in profound ways.The Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on American soil, docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama, in July 1860?more than half a century after the passage of a federal law banning the importation of captive Africans, and nine months before the beginning of the Civil War. The last of its survivors lived well into the twentieth century. They were the last witnesses to the final act of a terrible and significant period in world history.In this epic work, Dr. Hannah Durkin tells the stories of the Clotilda?s 110 captives, drawing on her intensive archival, historical, and sociological research. The Survivors of the Clotilda follows their lives from their kidnappings in what is modern-day Nigeria through a terrifying 45-day journey across the Middle Passage; from the subsequent sale of the ship?s 103 surviving children and young people into slavery across Alabama to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement in Selma; from the foundation of an all-Black African Town (later Africatown) in Northern Mobile?an inspiration for writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Zora Neale Hurston?to the foundation of the quilting community of Gee?s Bend?a Black artistic circle whose cultural influence remains enormous.An astonishing, deeply compelling tapestry of history, biography, and social commentary, The Survivors of the Clotilda is a tour de force that deepens our knowledge and understanding of the Black experience and of America and its tragic past.The Survivors of the Clotilda includes 30 artworks and photographs.

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Book SynopsisAfter Britain’s Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, a squadron of Royal Navy vessels was sent to the West Coast of Africa tasked with suppressing the thriving transatlantic slave trade. Drawing on previously unpublished papers found in private collections and various archives in the UK and abroad, this book examines the personal and cultural experiences of the naval officers at the frontline of Britain’s anti-slavery campaign in West Africa. It explores their unique roles in this 60-year operation: at sea, boarding slave ships bound for the Americas and ‘liberating’ captive Africans; on shore, as Britain resolved to ‘improve’ West African societies; and in the metropolitan debates around slavery and abolitionism in Britain. Their personal narratives are revealing of everyday concerns of health, rewards and strategy, to more profound questions of national honour, cultural encounters, responsibility for the lives of others in the most distressing of circumstances, and the true meaning of ‘freedom’ for formerly enslaved African peoples. British anti-slavery efforts and imperial agendas were tightly bound in the nineteenth century, inseparable from ideas of national identity. This is a book about individuals tasked with extraordinary service, military men who also worked as guardians, negotiators, and envoys of abolition.Trade Review'Based on meticulous research in national and regional archive collections, this book provides a richly documented account of how men engaged in Royal Navy suppression activities reacted to their work in intercepting vessels carrying enslaved Africans.'Professor Suzanne Schwarz, University of Worcester‘[Envoys of Abolition] offer[s] a detailed exploration of British officers and their important role in the suppression of the slave trade… This well-researched and nuanced discussion of naval officers illustrates their complex roles in West Africa as well as their powerful impact on metropolitan discourses.’ Evan C. Rothera, The Northern Mariner Table of ContentsList of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1: Abolition at sea Chapter 2: Abolition on shore Chapter 3: Officers’ commitment to the anti-slavery cause Chapter 4: Prize voyages and ideas of freedom Chapter 5: Encounters with Africa Chapter 6: Officers’ contributions to Britain’s anti-slavery culture Conclusion Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisSituates famous and lesser-known eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Haitian revolutionaries, pamphleteers, and political thinkers within the global history of ideas, showing how their systems of knowledge and interpretation took centre stage in the Age of Revolutions.Trade Review[A] magisterial recounting of Haiti's intellectual history . . . . The book is the latest in Daut's constellation of works on the Caribbean intellectual tradition, and Daut is herself one of the most dynamic contemporary voices on Haiti."—Laurent Dubois, Los Angeles Review of Books

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Book SynopsisWINNER OF THE ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZE 2023SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 AMAZON CANADA FIRST NOVEL AWARD COSMOPOLITAN'S 10 BEST HISTORICAL FICTION BOOKS OF 2023'Fresh and propulsive . . . a veneration of those whose tales are often forgotten' New York Times'A mesmerizing, lyrical testament to the power of storytelling' Atwood Gibson Writer's Trust Fiction Prize judgesFreedom, you can't get and bury, and keep it and keep it so it won't ever go away. No, child.You got to swing your freedom like a club.In 1859, deep in the forests of Canada, an elderly woman sits behind bars. She came to Dunmore via the Underground Railroad to escape enslavement, but an American bounty hunter tracked her down. Now she's in jail for killing him, and the fragile peace of Dunmore, a town settled by people fleeing the American south, hangs by a thread. Lensinda Martin, a smart young reporter, wants to gather the woman's testimony before she can be condemned, but the old woman has no time for confessions. Instead she proposes a barter: a story for a story. As the women swap stories - of family and first loves, of survival and freedom against all odds - Lensinda must face her past. And it seems the old woman may carry a secret that could shape Lensinda's destiny. Travelling along the path of the Underground Railroad from the American South to British Canada, from the Indigenous nations around the Great Lakes, to the Black refugee communities of Canada, In the Upper Country is an unforgettable debut about the interwoven history of peoples in North America, slavery and resistance, and two women reckoning with the stories they've been given, and the ones they want to tell. Trade ReviewThe harshly real and the fantastic mingle in ways that recall Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Water Dancer and Esi Edugyan's Washington Black. What's most impressive is Thomas's imaginative power; sure-handed, often lyrical prose; and strong, complex, resilient women. An exceptional work that mines a rich historical vein * Kirkus, starred review *In the Upper Country is not only fiction alive with history; it is historic. This masterful novel is the first to narrate the forging of the Afro-Métis - or Black & Indigenous - people out of European (or Indigenous) enslavement . . . practically every page turns up a sentence or a phrase that could have been penned by Toni Morrison or James Baldwin -- George Elliot Clarke, critically acclaimed poet and novelistA sweeping epic that imagines all the ways our ancestors tried to get free. This is an exciting voice in fiction, as interested in the complexities of land and belonging as in the vagaries of human love and connection -- Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of LibertieTremendous . . . In the Upper Country enlightens and empowers in a way few other literary sagas can, by humanizing people who have long been historical footnotes and bringing their stories to the centre. Kai Thomas is a visionary, an advocate, and overall a groundbreaking storytelling voice who has now contributed a classic to this country's canon. This novel will resonate for generations to come -- Waubgeshig Rice, bestselling author of Moon of the Crusted SnowStories within stories; until I read them, I hadn't realised these are ones I'd long been wanting, needing even. In this remarkable debut, Kai Thomas fills out the picture of a place, a time, peoples and their relationships, all previously neglected in the day-to-day unfolding of the nations. His immensely compelling details, and a host of voices so well-wrought you can see and hear the speakers long after you've finished reading, will leave you eager to see what he'll do next -- Shani Mootoo, author of Polar VortexMesmerizing . . . at once intimate and majestic, Thomas's ambitious work heralds a bright new voice * Publishers Weekly, starred review *The old woman will tell her story, if Lensinda shares one of her own. Thus begins an incredible exchange that reveals an interconnected history of love and survival for the Black and Indigenous peoples of North America. * Book Riot *A Gothic-tinged puzzle box of a novel . . . there's undeniable force to the embedded stories and the historical truths they bring to vivid life * Toronto Star *Groundbreaking . . . This fascinating series of stories within stories reflects the fragmentary history of African and Indigenous people experiencing the effects of enslavement. Engrossing and intensely readable, this book represents just the beginning of a larger narrative, with many chapters yet to be told; very highly recommended * Library Journal *Exceptional . . . Kai Thomas deftly and compassionately braids deeply engrossing stories within stories that explore a little-known aspect of Canadian history. In the Upper Country is a mesmerizing, lyrical testament to the power of storytelling, as this is among the protagonists' tools for survival in a harsh reality rife with violence and dehumanization. -- 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Jury (francescaekwuyasi, Alix Hawley, MG Vassanji)

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Book SynopsisTHE UNTOLD STORY OF THE BERBICE SLAVE REBELLION Winner of the 2021 Cundill History Prize Winner of the 2021 Frederick Douglass Prize 'A gripping tale about the human need for freedom ... spellbinding' NPR 'Impressively detailed ... Kars provokes the reader into seeing the many sides involved in this bloody and desperate struggle with empathy and pity ... excellent' Paterson Joseph, actor and author of The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho 'A masterpiece ... a story for the ages' Elizabeth Fenn, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Encounters at the Heart of the World In February 1763, thousands of slaves in the Dutch colony of Berbice - in present-day Guyana - launched a massive rebellion - and very nearly succeeded. For an entire year, they fought their enslavers, dreaming of establishing a free state, what would have been the first Black republic. Instead, they vanished from history. Blood on the River is the explosive story of this forgotten revolution, an event that almost changed the face of the Americas. Historian Marjoleine Kars draws on long-buried Dutch interrogation transcripts to reconstruct a rich day-by-day account of this extraordinary event, providing a rare look at the political vision of enslaved people at the dawn of the Age of Revolution. An astonishing original work of history, Blood on the River will change our understanding of revolutions, slavery and the story of freedom in the New World.Trade ReviewA riveting addition to the history of the search for freedom in the Americas * Kirkus Reviews *A richly detailed account of a gripping human story -- H.W. Brands * Washington Post *[An] epic history ... A sweeping, thoughtful narrative, joining a new wave of books that make visible previously dismissed Black voices -- Carolyn Kellogg * Los Angeles Times *A gripping tale about the human need for freedom ... The story of the Berbice Rebellion begs to be told, and Kars' telling is impressive -- Martha Anne Toll * NPR Books *A model for how academic history can reach a wide audience, a narrative-driven work which presents pioneering archival scholarship in which we can hear the voices of the enslaved protagonists ... Kars represents the complexities of the rebellion without romanticising it -- Bethan Fisk * History Today *Brilliant ... 900 testimonies give unparalleled access to the complex dynamics of resistance and the voices of the enslaved ... A tour de force -- Catherine Hall FBA FRHS, Emerita Professor of History at UCL and Chair of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British SlaveryAn impressively detailed account of one of the earliest resistance battles against the horrors of slavery. Kars provokes the reader into seeing the many sides involved in this bloody and desperate struggle with empathy and pity. There's a sense of the futility of the fight against the Dutch and European Empires, but somehow she manages to convey hope and a degree of heroism on the side of those fighting for their freedom ... excellent -- Paterson Joseph, actor and author of The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius SanchoA powerful book that will appeal to experts and - thanks to the lively and accessible writing style - the general public alike * Black Perspectives *This striking study unearths a meaningful chapter in the history of slavery * Publishers Weekly *Meticulously researched and careful to prioritize the perspectives of the marginalized, Blood on the River offers a fascinating glimpse of the complex history of slavery in the Americas * Booklist *A must-read for anyone interested in slave revolts and the history of Atlantic slavery * Library Journal *[A] masterpiece ... Marjoleine Kars has unearthed a little-known rebellion in the Dutch colony of Berbice and rendered its story with insight, empathy, and wisdom. You'll find no easy platitudes herein. Instead, you'll find human beings in full relief, acting with courage, kindness, calculation, and mendacity in their quest for self-determination. Blood on the River is a story for the ages -- Elizabeth Fenn, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan PeopleTakes readers on a moving journey deep into a colonial heart of darkness. Drawing on rich and challenging sources, Marjoleine Kars reveals enslaved people making a rebellion that lingers in memory and landscape -- Alan Taylor, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Internal Enemy and William Cooper's TownThis is required reading for historians of the Black Atlantic world -- Jennifer Morgan, professor of history at New York University and author of Reckoning with SlaveryOne of the great slave revolts in modern history has at last found a gifted historian to tell its epic tale. Using a breathtaking archival discovery to make the Berbice rebels vivid flesh-and-blood actors, Marjoleine Kars deeply enriches the global scholarship on the history of slavery and resistance -- Marcus Rediker, author of The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and FreedomVivid ... The aborted attempt at freedom she chronicles provides a harrowing counterpoint to the American and French revolutions that would soon follow -- Russell Shorto, author of The Island at the Center of the WorldMarjoleine Kars has brought from the archives the voices of the enslaved, both in hope and in defeat. A tale of importance for our time -- Natalie Zemon Davis, author of Trickster Travels and The Return of Martin Guerre

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Book SynopsisA highly original history of American portraiture that places the experiences of enslaved people at its centerTrade Review2024 Charles Rufus Morey Book Prize Shortlist, sponsored by CAA“A model of method, an investigative tour de force that fluidly mixes laborious archival research and time-honored art historical savvy.”—Paul Staiti, author of Of Arms and Artists: The American Revolution through Painters’ Eyes“Jennifer Van Horn accomplishes something that others have hardly imagined, relating a story of African American participation in and resistance to Euro-American visual culture throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”—Susan Rather, author of The American School: Artists and Status in the Late Colonial and Early National Era“In this groundbreaking study, Jennifer Van Horn rightly defines production, viewing, representation, preservation, and destruction as acts of subversion that expand our understanding both of the lives of the enslaved and the multivalent ways in which early American portraiture functioned.”—Steven Nelson, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art

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Book SynopsisThe first book-length study of household servants and slaves, exploring a visual history over 400 years and four continentsTrade Review“The topic is an absorbing one and leaves the reader wanting to know more. . . . Complexities of definition and categorisation are apparent, which the author fully acknowledges.”—Tabitha Barber, Art Newspaper“Wolfthal charts some changes over the period and draws on examples from across Europe. Having made the point that servants are largely invisible and always inferior, she looks for exceptions to the general rule.”—Norma Clarke, Literary Review

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Book SynopsisDuring the first generations of European settlement in North America, a number of interconnected Northeastern families carved out private empires. In Bound by Bondage, Nicole Saffold Maskiell argues that slavery was a crucial component to the rise and enduring influence of this emergent aristocracy. Dynastic families built prestige based on shared notions of mastery, establishing sprawling manorial estates and securing cross-colonial landholdings and trading networks that stretched from the Northeast to the South, the Caribbean, and beyond. The members of this elite class were mayors, governors, senators, judges, and presidents, and they were also some of the largest slaveholders in the North. Aspirations to power and status, grounded in the political economy of human servitude, ameliorated ethnic and religious rivalries, and united once antagonistic Anglo and Dutch families, ensuring that Dutch networks endured throughout the English and then Revolutionary periods.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Manhunt 1. Neger: Race, Slavery, and Status in the Dutch Northeast (1640s–60s) 2. Kolonist: Slaveholding and the Survival of Expansive Anglo-Dutch Elite Networks (1650s–90s) 3. Naam: Race, Family, and Connection on the Borderlands (1680s–90s) 4. Bond: Forging an Anglo-Dutch Slaveholding Northeast (1690s–1710s) 5. Family: Kinship, Ambition, and Fear in a Time of Rebellions (1710s–20s) 6. Market: Creating Kinship-Based Empires United by Slaveholding (1730s–50s) 7. Identity: Navigating Racial Expectations to Escape Slavery (1750s–60s) Conclusion: Gentry

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Book SynopsisLONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE'Alex Renton has done Britain a favour and written a brutally honest book about his family's involvement with slavery. Blood Legacy could change our frequently defensive national conversation about slavery/race' Sathnam Sanghera'Utterly gripped - An incredible book. Alex's work is my book in practice' Emma DabiriThrough the story of his own family's history as slave and plantation owners, Alex Renton looks at how we owe it to the present to understand the legacy of the past. When British Caribbean slavery was abolished across most of the British Empire in 1833, it was not the newly liberated who received compensation, but the tens of thousands of enslavers who were paid millions of pounds in government money. The descendants of some of those slave owners are among the wealthiest and most powerful people in Britain today.A group of Caribbean countries is calling on ten European nations to discuss the payment of trillions of dollars for the damage done by transatlantic slavery and its continuing legacy. Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter and other activist groups are causing increasing numbers of white people to reflect on how this history of abuse and exploitation has benefited them.Blood Legacy explores what inheritance - political, economic, moral and spiritual - has been passed to the descendants of the slave owners and the descendants of the enslaved. He also asks, crucially, how the former - himself among them - can begin to make reparations for the past.Trade ReviewA courageous, deeply affecting and excoriatingly honest account of his family's role in enslavement -- PHILIPPE SANDS * * Financial Times * *Renton . . . dismantles the myths with the efficiency of someone shelling pistachios for a snack . . . remarkable . . . an incredible work of scholarship -- SATHNAM SANGHERA * * The Times * *An important book . . . one of the strengths of Renton's book is that it takes seriously the issue of class . . . In breaking class ranks, Renton has given voice to a long suppressed truth . . . [an] admirable book * * Observer * *In this unflinching, fascinating and very human account, drawn from his own family papers, Alex Renton takes a crucial first step towards reparation, by acknowledging the cruel reality of his ancestors' callous exploitation of enslaved people's labour from afar; detailing the damage done, and both asking and beginning to answer the question of what can be done to purge these sins and their legacies today -- MIRANDA KAUFMANN, author of Black TudorsBlood Legacy is a moving, timely, well-written and strikingly thoughtful book that makes an important contribution to the growing debate on the horrors that accompanied Britain's empire-building. Alex Renton's forensic and remarkably honest analysis of his own family papers, and the profound darkness they contain, highlights our continuing failure to acknowledge the extreme toxicity of so much of our Imperial history -- WILLIAM DALRYMPLEUtterly gripped - an incredible book. Alex's work is my book in practice -- EMMA DABIRIA deeply moving, brave and powerful book -- ANDREW MARRMoving and deeply researched, Alex Renton's account of his ancestors' slaveholding brings home the everyday brutality of Caribbean slavery and its contribution to the making of Britain both then and since. Blood Legacy sets the ordinariness of slaveholding in the eighteenth-century monied world alongside accounts of the extraordinary lives of those they owned. This is a book that asks white Britons to look hard at our past and its consequences in the present -- PROFESSOR DIANA PATONA fascinating family history of profit and loss made during slavery in the Caribbean. This book is truth not fiction -- PROFESSOR SIR GEOFF PALMERA useful counter to British self-congratulation on the ending of the Atlantic slave trade . . . It must make any reader question much of the received wisdom about the eighteenth-century Enlightenment -- ANDREW MARR * * Sunday Times * *

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Book SynopsisThe first history of black slavery in the Maritimes, North to Bondage is a startling corrective to the enduring myth of Canada as a land of freedom at the end of the Underground Railroad.Trade ReviewNorth to Bondage provides a powerful interruption of the historical silencing of slavery in Canada, detailing the complex origins and intricate social relationships that formed the basis of slavery in the Maritimes. The book thus functions as an important corrective to Canadian narratives of slavery that have functioned largely to erase black presence and suffering in Canada by encouraging a belief that slavery was either non-existent, benevolent, or economically unimportant. * Canadian Literature *...North to Bondage is an important work that will become the standard text for understanding Maritime slavery...it not only challenges scholars of early Canada to think about the place and role of slavery but also Canada’s understanding of its national identity. For that reason, it has a place in many different classrooms, including courses on early Canadian history, multiculturalism in Canada, and Atlantic slavery. -- Jared Hardesty, Western Washington University * American Review of Canadian Studies, Vol. 46 No. 4, February 2017 *Whitfield’s book places the experiences of enslaved persons at the centre of this history. This is skilfully done given that there are few sources that contain the unmediated voices of enslaved people in Atlantic Canada …[Whitfield] achieves this by combining archival material and histories of slavery in what became the United States and Canada. He demonstrates that enslaved persons negotiated their experiences of enslavement and he shows that they were integral to bringing about the demise of slavery in the early nineteenth century. -- Eleanor Bird, The University of Sheffield * British Journal of Canadian Studies *Whitfield’s important and very readable study reinserts Maritimes slavery and black labour into the narrative of Canada’s many beginnings while also keeping the relevant black Atlantic connections in full view. -- Winfried Siemerling, University of Waterloo * Left History *Whitfield presents a new avenue for understanding the complexities of slavery in Maritime Canada and opens the door for future research. Rather than expanding on traditional research that stresses the freedoms found by enslaved or escaped African-Americans, Whitfield complicates the narratives and creates a more encompassing image of life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries ... North to Freedom will be a welcomed addition to courses in both Canadian and American history, especially those looking to bring in new perspectives that challenge the history of slavery. -- Amy Mitchell-Cook, University of West Florida * Canadian Journal of History *North to Bondage is a significant contribution to several subfields of historical research, including African diasporic studies, the history of slavery, early American history, and early Canadian history. At just 118 pages of text and written in accessible prose, it is also very readable and ideally suited for the classroom. -- Christopher C. Jones, Brigham Young University * Early Canadian History *Amani Whitfield provides a nuanced and remarkably fulsome picture of the lives of enslaved people in the Maritimes by drawing on runaway advertisements, court documents, and personal papers. * Immigrants & Minorities *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Slavery in the Maritime Colonies1 Slavery and the American Context2 Maritime Slavery and Loyalist Settlement3 Slave Work4 The World of Maritime Slaves and Slaveholders5 Ending SlaveryConclusion: Legacies of SlaveryAppendix A: Possible Slave NumbersAppendix B: Slave ProfilesNotesBibliographic Essay

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Pulitzer Prize for HistoryThe unforgettable saga of one enslaved woman''s fight for justice--and reparations Born into slavery, Henrietta Wood was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed in 1848. In 1853, a Kentucky deputy sheriff named Zebulon Ward colluded with Wood''s employer, abducted her, and sold her back into bondage. She remained enslaved throughout the Civil War, giving birth to a son in Mississippi and never forgetting who had put her in this position. By 1869, Wood had obtained her freedom for a second time and returned to Cincinnati, where she sued Ward for damages in 1870. Astonishingly, after eight years of litigation, Wood won her case: in 1878, a Federal jury awarded her $2,500. The decision stuck on appeal. More important than the amount, though the largest ever awarded by an American court in restitution for slavery, was the fact that any money was awarded at all. By the time the case was decided, Ward had become a wealthy businessman and a pioneer of convict leasing in the South. Wood''s son later became a prominent Chicago lawyer, and she went on to live until 1912. McDaniel''s book is an epic tale of a black woman who survived slavery twice and who achieved more than merely a moral victory over one of her oppressors. Above all, Sweet Taste of Liberty is a portrait of an extraordinary individual as well as a searing reminder of the lessons of her story, which establish beyond question the connections between slavery and the prison system that rose in its place.Trade ReviewThe reader not only follows the fascinating narrative of a woman who lost her freedom, but also learns of the intricacies of slavery in a border state like Kentucky, the pain of separation from loved ones, and the ordeals of being sold "down the river," surviving on a large cotton plantation, and being an enslaved refugee in Texas during the Civil War... It is an enlightening account from the point of view of an enslaved woman about the arduous trip — and the subsequent years — that many enslaved people were forced to endure by their masters to avoid their being liberated by Union armies... [McDaniel] has turned these into a captivating account of this period, revealing how the legal and economic aspects of the institution of slavery interacted in very personal and human ways with those who were kept enslaved. * Angela Boswell, Professor of History at Henderson State University, Southwestern Historical Quarterly *As a whole, Sweet Taste of Liberty is the fruit of excellent scholarship and a timely and significant addition to the field of U.S. racial history. * Ken Chujo, J.F. Oberlin University, Tokyo, The Journal of Southern History *In this gripping study, Rice University historian McDaniel recounts the painful but triumphant story of one enslaved woman's long fight for justice... McDaniel tells this story engrossingly and accessibly. This is a valuable contribution to Reconstruction history with clear relevance to current debates about reparations for slavery. * Publishers Weekly *Sweet Taste of Liberty is a masterpiece. Using an extraordinary archival discovery, McDaniel expertly weaves a compelling, fine-grained narrative of the extraordinary life of Henrietta Wood. . . . But this is not simply a biography. It also a work of profound analysis, layered with McDaniel's deep knowledge of slavery, emancipation, and the law. The book raises the most profound questions about slavery, reparations, and the debt that the United States owes to the people whose unfree labor constructed a great deal of that nation. * Gregory P. Downs, author of The Second American Revolution: The Civil War-Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic *As America grapples with reparations for slavery, Caleb McDaniel unearths the astounding story of a woman who survived bondage, twice, and fought for restitution against impossible odds. In lucid and vivid prose, he brings us a chilling, inspiring, and timely examination of both the necessity and complexity of redressing historical crimes. * Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic and Spying on the South *Henrietta Wood's quest to be made whole by seeking reparations from the man who kidnapped and re-enslaved her is a heart-tugging page-turner. With fidelity to the historical record and insight into the emotions that run through it, Caleb McDaniel's Sweet Taste of Liberty tells how enslaved women lived along the jagged lines that divided house and field, city and countryside, North and South, and slavery and freedom. Her triumph is a tribute to one woman's persistence, courage, legal savvy, and an enduring devotion to family-its lessons for us are timeless. * Martha S. Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Johns Hopkins University, author of Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America *McDaniel renders an enthralling biography of a determined, resilient woman... A well-researched, well-told story that also contributes to the debate about reparations." * Library Journal *Sweet Taste of Liberty is a profound book that could not have been released at a better time... It is an account brimming with as much bittersweetness as it does hope." * ZORA *[A] superbly written chronicle . . . . rich with vivid personalities and unexpected turns." * Wall Street Journal *Through painstaking archival research, Bell and McDaniel have reconstructed their lives with such vivid detail, sensitivity, and riveting storytelling that you would think each of their figures left us whole autobiographies. For the simple act of recovering their stories, both books would be commendable. But what makes them essential reading is the larger questions they demand of us as readers: What exactly was the condition under which un-enslaved black people lived before emancipation * and what is it that they and their descendants are owed?The New Republic *W. Caleb McDaniel tells a breathless tale with an ominously dark feel through many of its pages, because the monsters here were real. Yes, it's a complicated tale that races from north to south, but the righteous audacity that ultimately occurred in Ohio in 1870 makes it worthwhile, fist-pumping, and satisfying. Historians, of course, will want Sweet Taste of Liberty. Feminists shouldn't miss it. Folks with an opinion on reparations should find it. All of you will want to take it home. * Miami Times *A deeply rich story... This beautifully written book is a must read. * Civil War Monitor *Sweet Taste of Liberty uses the past to show how the open wounds of slavery still exist. * The Advocate *Researchers, leisurely readers and those in the general public looking to be more informed about the history of slavery and reparations in this country, would be hard-pressed not to find this book compelling. It is a story that deserves to be heard and a conversation that needs to be had. * Bowling Green Daily News *A book that single-handedly proves that new American heroes can be found in the obscured corners of this country's history. * Bowery Boys, American History Book of the Year 2020 *Table of ContentsPrologue Part I - The Worst Slave of Them All Chapter 1: The Crossing Chapter 2: Touseytown Chapter 3: Down River Chapter 4: Ward's Return Chapter 5: Cincinnati Chapter 6: The Plan Chapter 7: The Flight Part II - Forks of the Road Chapter 8: Raising a Muss Chapter 9: Wood versus Ward Chapter 10: The Keeper Chapter 11: Natchez Chapter 12: Brandon Hall Chapter 13: Versailles Chapter 14: Revolution Chapter 15: The March Part III - The Return of Henrietta Wood Chapter 16: Arthur Chapter 17: Robertson County Chapter 18: Dawn and Doom Chapter 19: Nashville Chapter 20: A Rather Interesting Case Chapter 21: Story of a Slave Chapter 22: The Verdict Epilogue Acknowledgements Appendix: An Essay on Sources Notes Index

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Book SynopsisHarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.

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Book SynopsisBuild your child's reading confidence at home with books at the right levelHarriet Tubman was born into slavery in 19th Century America, but managed to escape and gain her freedom. Follow this amazing biography of a woman who was prepared to risk her own life to save others from the slavery she had escaped, and learn about the Underground Railroad that she used to achieve this.Topaz/Band 13 books offer longer and more demanding reads for children to investigate and evaluate.Text type: A biographyCurriculum links: History; CitizenshipThis book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

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Book SynopsisBuild your child's reading confidence at home with books at the right levelAntislavery campaigner, author, diplomat and political statesmen, Frederick Douglass was one of the greatest men of his age. Having been enslaved himself, Frederick fought publicly against slavery and was an inspiration in the fight for social and political change. Written by Amanda Mitchison, find out about this life-long battle to fight for equality.Sapphire/Band 16 books offer longer reads to develop children''s sustained engagement with texts and are more complex syntactically.Text type: A biographyCurriculum links: History, CitizenshipThis book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

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Book SynopsisI cannot help but see the bodies of my near ancestors in the current caravans of desperate souls fleeing from place to place, chased by famine, war and toxins. Ideas honed in slavery of the otherness, the boorishness, the inferiority of thy neighbour have continued to travel through American society.'The story of slavery in America is not over. It lives on in how we speak to one another, in how we treat one another, in how our societies are organised. In Giving a Damn, the legal scholar Patricia Williams finds that when you begin to unpick current debates around immigration, freedom of speech, the culture wars and wall-building, beneath them lies the unexamined history of enslavement in the West. Our ability to dehumanize one another can be traced all the way from the plantation to the US President's Twitter account.Williams begins in the American South with Gone With the Wind (still the second most popular book in the USA after the Bible), that nostalgic tale full of the myths of th

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Book SynopsisAn important book of epic scope on America's first racially integrated, religiously-inspired political movement for changeThe Underground Railroad, a movement peopled by daring heroes and heroines, and everyday folk For most, the mention of the Underground Railroad evokes images of hidden tunnels, midnight rides, and hairsbreadth escapes. Yet the Underground Railroad's epic story is much more morally complex and politically divisive than even the myths suggest. Against a backdrop of the country's westward expansion,which brought together Easterners who had engaged in slavery primarily in the abstract alongside slaveholding Southerners and their slaves, arose a clash of values that evolved into a fierce fight for nothing less than the country's soul. Beginning six decades before the Civil War, freedom-seeking blacks and pious whites worked together to save tens of thousands of lives, often at the risk of great physical danger to themselves. Not since the American Revolution

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Book SynopsisTrade Review“This is an emotional and passionate book, raw in its grief and anger, but also imbued with hope for redemption. Based on objective his­torical fact and subjective experience, Of Greed and Glory has the power of a sermon and the urgency of a manifesto.” — Deborah Mason, BookPage "As indispensable to understanding the Americas as Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told. Of Greed and Glory powerfully demonstrates that though we as Black Americans are far from faultless in some of our most egregious behavior on the mean plantations and streets of antebellum and modern America, we nonetheless have had to grow our dignity beneath the pitiless boot of those who looked into the tiny faces of our infants and saw only dollar signs. Powerful and necessary." — Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Award winning author of The Color Purple and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart “If you want to understand the current issues surrounding race, social justice, and inequality, you have to read Deborah Plant’s book, Of Greed and Glory. Deborah understands that the issues surrounding race, unfolding before us now in America, are deeply rooted in the legacy of the African American past. She writes eloquently and beautifully about that past. Of Greed and Glory is a must-read book for socially conscious citizens.” — Clyde W. Ford, Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award in African American fiction—winning author of Of Blood and Sweat and Think Black "Of Greed and Glory is impossible to put down. It’s a searing, provocative analysis of how the roots of slavery in the US still infiltrate so many of our social institutions. Plant’s vivid prose will leave you affected, challenged, and thinking about this book long after you’re done reading." — Adia Wingfield, author of Gray Areas, Flatlining, and No More Invisible Man "Deborah G. Plant courageously and painstakingly provides insight into the devastation and trauma experienced generations of African Americans, persons of color, and the poor … This is a must read that challenges us to become active in the movement to abolish slavery, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression that exist in our nation." — Diane D. Turner, author of Feeding the Soul and curator of the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University Libraries

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Book SynopsisTrade Review“an essential reckoning with the roots of the racial wealth gap in America.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A compelling argument for long-overdue reparations—though much more than that alone.” — Kirkus Reviews “Ford’s forceful arguments and writing will compel readers to face the facts of the long history of exploitation and appropriation that have defined so much of America’s struggle with itself to give substance and meaning to its promise of 'freedom' for all.” — Library Journal (starred review) “Ford makes a clear case that the past is never over. The wounds inflicted by slavery have never healed, and he argues that they will continue to harm our country until we deal with them honestly. For many Americans, reading Of Blood and Sweat will be an excellent first step in that process.” — BookPage

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Book Synopsis''Taut, fascinating and controversial. The Atlantic Sound may prove to be as influential today as Roots was a generation ago'' Sunday Times In The Atlantic Sound Caryl Phillips explores the complex notion of what constitutes ''home''. Seen through the historical prism of the Atlantic Slave trade, he undertakes a personal quest to come to terms with the dislocation and discontinuities that a diasporan history engenders in the soul of an individual.Philips journeys from the Caribbean to Britain by banana boat, repeating a journey he made to England as a child in the 1950s. He then visits three pivotal cities: LTrade ReviewLike Jonathan Raban and the early V. S. Naipaul, Phillips can do truly live reportage. The honesty and detail forces you to experience what the writer is going through . . . Whether he is writing fiction or non-fiction, he seems to hone every thought and word before he allows it to leave his head. That stillness beneath his words is what makes Caryl Phillips such an exceptional writer and this book so compelling -- Yasmin Alibhai-Brown * Observer *So compelling and so original...The result is history and sociology at its most heartfelt * Booklist *A powerful re-examination of the salve-trade and its terrible legacy * Observer *A glowing, indicting, dignified and dissenting work... The Atlantic Sound is crucial, unputdownable * Scotsman *'A splendidly honest and vividly detailed venture into some of history's darkest corners-by a novelist who is also a superb reporter' * Kirkus Reviews *

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Book SynopsisFrederick Douglass was a key figure in helping to secure the abolition of slavery in America discover his Narrative this Black History Month. A masterpiece [Douglass] was not only self-educated, with a love of language which should still be an inspiration; he was also self-created' New York Times Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818. After his escape in 1838 he became an ardent abolitionist, and his autobiography was an instant bestseller upon publication in 1845. In it he describes with harrowing honesty his life as a slave the cruelty he suffered at the hands of plantation owners; his struggles to educate himself in a world where slaves are deliberately kept ignorant; and ultimately, his fight for his right to freedom. A passionately written, inteTrade ReviewSlavery, color, racism and the struggle for equal rights all come together in the Douglass story...a declaration of freedom by a runaway slave that became a powerful antislavery tract * New York Times *Frederick Douglass has been hailed as one of history's most inspirational leaders and is a personal hero of Barack Obama who called him "the father of the civil rights movement" * Mirror *His life retains an emblematic glow transcending its biographical ingredients * Independent *

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Book SynopsisTruth's landmark slave narrative chronicles her experiences as a slave in upstate New York and her transformation into an extraordinary abolitionist, feminist, orator, and preacher. Based on the complete 1884 edition, this volume includes the Book of Life, a collection of letters and sketches about Truth's life written subsequent to the original 1850 publication of the Narrative, and A Memorial Chapter, a sentimental account of her death.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.Trade Review"The time is long overdue for a compelling look at the legendary Sojourner Truth. Margaret Washington deserves our gratitude for reclaiming Truth and shedding light on the most enigmatic black woman of the 19th century."-- Darlene Clark Hine, Professor of History, Michigan State UniversityTable of ContentsNarrative of Sojourner Truth Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Nell Irvin PainterIntroductionSuggestions for Further ReadingA Note on the TextNARRATIVE OF SOJOURNER TRUTHPreface by Frances W. TitusNarrative of Sojourner Truth"Book of Life"A Memorial ChapterExplanatory Notes

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Book SynopsisThe History of Mary Prince (1831) was the first narrative of a black woman to be published in Britain. It describes Prince''s sufferings as a slave in Bermuda, Turks Island and Antigua, and her eventual arrival in London with her brutal owner Mr Wood in 1828. Prince escaped from him and sought assistance from the Anti-Slavery Society, where she dictated her remarkable story to Susanna Strickland (later Moodie). A moving and graphic document, The History drew attention to the continuation of slavery in the Caribbean, despite an 1807 Act of Parliament officially ending the slave trade. It inspired two libel actions and ran into three editions in the year of its publication. This powerful rallying cry for emancipation remains an extraordinary testament to Prince''s ill-treatment, suffering and survival.Table of ContentsThe History of Mary Prince AcknowledgmentsIntroductionFurther ReadingChronologyA Note on the TextTHE HISTORY OF MARY PRINCENotesAppendix OneAppendix TwoAppendix ThreeAppendix Four

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Book SynopsisA haunting, evocative recounting of her life as a slave in North Carolina, and her final escape and emancipation, Jacobs'' narrative, written between 1853 and 1858 and published in 1861, is one of the most important books ever written documenting the traumas and horrors of slavery in the antebellum South.

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Book SynopsisA freed slave's daring assertion of the evils of slaveryBorn in present-day Ghana, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano was kidnapped at the age of thirteen and sold into slavery by his fellow Africans in 1770; he worked in the brutal plantation chain gangs of the West Indies before being freed in England. His Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery is the most direct criticism of slavery by a writer of African descent. Cugoano refutes pro-slavery arguments of the day, including slavery's supposed divine sanction; the belief that Africans gladly sold their own families into slavery; that Africans were especially suited to its rigors; and that West Indian slaves led better lives than European serfs. Exploiting his dual identity as both an African and a British citizen, Cugoano daringly asserted that all those under slavery's yoke had a moral obligation to rebel, while at the same time he appealed to white England's better self.For more than seventy years, PenTrade Review"Vincent Carretta singlehandedly has transformed our understanding of the origins of the Anglo-African literary tradition. He has breathed new life into texts long thought dead" —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.Table of ContentsEdited with an Introduction and Notes by Vincent CarrettaIntroduction by Vincent CarrettaAcknowledgmentsA Note on the TextIllustrationsSuggestions for Further ReadingThoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Humbly Submitted to The Inhabitants of Great-Britain, by Ottobah Cugoano, a Native of Africa.London: 1787Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery; or, the Nature of Servitude as Admitted by the Law of God, Compared to the Modern Slavery of the Africans in the West-Indies; In an Answer to the Advocates for Slavery and Oppression. Addressed to the Sons of Africa, by a Native.London: 1791Explanatory Notes to the 1787 PublicationExplanatory Notes to the 1791 PublicationAppendix: Correspondence of Quobna Ottobah Cugoano

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Book SynopsisMinutes after midnight on May 15, 1970, white members of the Jackson city police and the Mississippi Highway Patrol opened fire on young people in front of a women''s dormitory at Jackson State College, a historically black college in Jackson, Mississippi, discharging buckshot, rifle slugs, a submachine gun, carbines with military ammunition, and two 30.06 rifles loaded with armor-piercing bullets. Twenty-eight seconds later two young people lay dead, another 12 injured. Taking place just ten days after the killings at Kent State, the attack at Jackson State never garnered the same level of national attention and was chronically misunderstood as similar in cause. This book reclaims this story and situates it in the broader history of the struggle for African American freedom in the civil rights and black power eras. The book explores the essential role of white supremacy in causing the shootings and shaping the aftermath. By 1970, even historically conservative campuses such as Jackson State, where an all-white Board of Trustees of Institutions of Higher Learning had long exercised its power to control student behavior, were beginning to feel the impact of the movements for African American freedom. Though most of the students at Jackson State remained focused not on activism but their educations, racial consciousness was taking hold. It was this campus police attacked. Acting on racial animus and with impunity, the shootings reflected both traditional patterns of repression and the new logic and rhetoric of law and order, with its thinly veiled racial coding.In the aftermath, the victims and their survivors struggled unsuccessfully to find justice. Despite multiple investigative commissions, two grand juries and a civil suit brought by students and the families of the dead, the law and order narrative proved too powerful. No officers were charged, no restitution was paid, and no apologies were offered. The shootings were soon largely forgotten except among the local African American community, the injured victimized once more by historical amnesia born of the unwillingness to acknowledge the essential role of race in causing the violence.Trade ReviewCrisp, readable....Steeped in the Blood of Racism is a clarion call to acknowledge Jackson State's signal place in U.S. culture and, more importantly, to better examine how discourses of structural racism create the conditions that enable state violence and the factors that shape its apprehension and remembrance. * David Kieran, Journal of American History *Steeped in the Blood of Racism is a luminous revelation. Nancy K. Bristow's groundbreaking book represents a remarkable and long overdue history of the Jackson State shootings and their critical importance to the way we understand the Black Power era and our own. A must read. * Peniel E. Joseph, author of The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. *In this meticulous reconstruction of the May 15, 1970 shooting at Jackson State University in Mississippi, Nancy Bristow offers a compelling account of the events of that day and their subsequent erasure from American national memory. Mischaracterized as another 'Kent State' or dismissed through a dangerous law and order narrative, the shootings at Jackson State were instead part of a much longer history of white supremacist violence directed at the black community. Steeped in the Blood of Racism is an important book that demonstrates why this shooting has been so easily forgotten and why it is so important that it be remembered. * Renee Romano, Oberlin College *Finally we have an honest, deeply researched, searing account of the police killings of two Black students at Jackson State. Yes, Mississippi Goddamn! But sadly, the impunity of law enforcement for antiblack violence remains a nationwide crisis. * Martha Biondi, author of The Black Revolution on Campus *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: "They're taking these scars away" Chapter One: "A well conceived scheme to maintain segregation": Jackson State College and the Struggle for Freedom Chapter Two: "A revolution in our books": Civil Rights, Black Power, and a Changing Campus Chapter Three: "Buckshot, rifle slugs, a submachine gun": The Shootings at Jackson State College Chapter Four: "An open season on Negroes": The Struggles over the Aftermath Chapter Five: "The law says they can do it, and they did it": The Civil Suit and the Triumph of the Law and Order Perspective Chapter Six: "Largely unknown to the public": Race, Law and Order, and the Struggle over Memory Conclusion: "It was not a story to pass on": The Ongoing Trauma of State Violence Notes Index

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewThe narrative demonstrates how enslaved Africans did not simply acquiesce to slavery; rather, they challenged the tyrannical systems exploiting them, and the book is replete with glimpses of this revolutionary zeal. Additionally, the work challenges lazy categorisations that seek to present a binary relationship between Islam and Blackness, highlighting how Black African communities sought to preserve their religious tradition, even through the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. * Haroon Bashir, Muslim World Book Review *Three of the finest Brazilian historians of slavery of their generation...bring to us an innovative and imaginative biography of a transatlantic enslaved sojourner whose life and travels reveal the complexities of the slave system in the South Atlantic....Fluidly translated, rarely does a book so impressive in its research and conceptualization convey its message in so accessible a narrative that it can be used to great advantage by both graduate and undergraduate students. This is one of the finest books to date on slavery and its complexities in the nineteenth-century South Atlantic. * Stuart B. Schwartz, Hispanic American Historical Review *This microhistory of the Atlantic world puts into stark relief Brazil's manifold and complex connections with Africa. By brilliantly reconstructing the life of a single individual, the authors provide a multilayered and broad canvas of the South Atlantic during the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. This is social history at its best. * Roquinaldo Ferreira, University of Pennsylvania *A brilliant study, The Story of Rufino explores the blurred lines between slavery and freedom for black men in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World and the pervasive role of the transatlantic slave trade in the Brazilian economy. It also stresses the role of violence and fear in terrorizing black people. Rufino had a life replete of adventures and misadventures in a turbulent Atlantic. Thanks to the research of Reis, Gomes, and Carvalho, readers can follow the paths of an exceptional Muslim man, whose life was not so different from other enslaved Africans. * Mariana P. Candido, Mariana P. Candido, author of An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World: Benguela and Its Hinterland *This tour de force biography of an African-born enslaved man who purchased his freedom and became involved in the slave trade complicates our understanding of the Atlantic slavery. Rufino's exceptional and cosmopolitan trajectory, in a world where slavery was pervasive, is a lesson of cultural resistance and resilience. * Ana Lucia Araujo, Howard University *Three of the leading historians of slavery and the African diaspora in the South Atlantic have teamed up to bring us the remarkable story of Rufino José Maria, also known as Abuncare. Through painstaking research in a vast range of sources, the authors enable us to follow Rufino's travels across the Atlantic and back, through slavery and a degree of freedom, as both a victim and a participant in the transatlantic trade. Rufino's story is, in many respects, an exceptional one, but his struggles, compromises, and accomplishments as an African and a Muslim vividly illuminate the many worlds he inhabited during the waning decades of a trade whose tragic imprint is still visible on both sides of the Atlantic. * Barbara Weinstein, New York University *Rufino's story makes for an excellent case study of the complexities of the African Diaspora and the Black...Teacher-scholars in global history will find the book a useful volume for tying together threads from histories of Atlantic slavery, Islam in West Africa, Britain's suppression of the slave trade, and the illegal slave trade in Brazil. Instructors will find The Story of Rufino appropriate for undergraduate courses and graduate seminars that involve these topics, as well as courses on the Black Atlantic...the book's discussion of Rufino's healing business in Recife is a welcome addition to other studies of medicine and healing knowledge in the Black Atlantic. * Christopher Blakley, World History Connected *Readers should welcome the publication of this ambitious and deeply researched book, whether our primary interests lie in slavery and emancipation in the United States or across the Americas, in Atlantic history, or in African history. Indeed, one of the major contributions of this book is the depths to which its authors have gone to engage in the histories of West and West Central Africa, setting a new standard for Americas-based scholars investigating the lives of Africans who may have been violently forced across the Atlantic but for whom the spiritual and personal connections to their homeland remained strong. * Yuko Miki, American Historical Review *A vivid microhistory that brings together the histories of slavery, illegal slave trade ventures, and Islamic communities in West Africa and Brazil...Rufino's narrative also brings into focus the development of both syncretic and orthodox forms of Afro-Brazilian Islam in nineteenth century Brazil...Teacher-scholars in global history will find the book a useful volume for tying together threads from histories of Atlantic slavery, Islam in West Africa, Britainâs suppression of the slave trade, and the illegal slave trade in Brazil. Instructors will find The Story of Rufino appropriate for undergraduate courses and graduate seminars that involve these topics, as well as courses on the Black Atlantic. * Christopher Blakley, World History Connected *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Preface Part I Chapter 1: Rufino's Africa Chapter 2: Enslaved in Bahia Chapter 3: Enslaved in Porto Alegre Chapter 4: Farroupilha and Freedom Chapter 5: Freedman in Rio de Janeiro Chapter 6: Rio de Janeiro, A City in Fear Part II Chapter 7: Rufino Joins the Slave Trade Chapter 8: Luanda, Slave-trading Capital of Angola Chapter 9: Readying the Ermelinda Chapter 10: Rufino's Employers Chapter 11: Passengers, Shippers, and Cargo Chapter 12: The Ermelinda Goes to Sea Chapter 13: The Equipment Act Chapter 14: Sierra Leone Chapter 15: Among Akus and African Muslims Chapter 16: The trial of the Ermelinda Chapter 17: Dirty Tricks Chapter 18: Back to Sea Part III Chapter 19: Counting the Costs Chapter 20: Rufino's Recife Chapter 21: A Man of Faith and Sorcery Chapter 22: Tense Times in Rufino's Recife Chapter 23: A Free Man Chapter 24: The Muslims of Recife and a Doctrinal Dispute Epilogue Sources and Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisPart of The World in A Life series, this brief, inexpensive text provides insight into the life of slave soldier Malik Ambar. Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery across the Indian Ocean offers a rare look at an individual who began in obscurity in eastern Africa and reached the highest levels of South Asian political and military affairs in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Ambar''s rise from slavery in East Africa to ruler in South Asia sheds light on the diverse mix of people, products, and practices that shaped the Indian Ocean world during the early modern period. Originally from Ethiopia--historically called Abyssinia--Ambar is best known for having defended the Deccan from being occupied by the Mughals during the first quarter of the seventeenth century. His ingenuity as a military leader, his diplomatic skills, and his land-reform policies contributed to his success in keeping the Deccan free of Mughal imperial rule.We live in a global age where big concepts like globalization often tempt us to forget the personal side of the past. The titles in The World in A Life series aim to revive these meaningful lives. Each one shows us what it was like to live on a world historical stage. Brief, inexpensive, and thematic, each book can be read in a week, fit within a wide range of curricula, and shed insight into a particular place or time. Four to six short primary sources at the end of each volume sharpen the reader''s view of an individual''s impact on world history.Trade ReviewWriting in an engaging and imaginative style, Omar H. Ali does a remarkable job of reconstructing the most scholarly and accessible account yet published of this remarkable African leader. Drawing upon both previous studies of Malik Ambar and a rich trove of primary documents from Indian history, he further enhances our understanding of Ambar with field research in both Ethiopia and India. * Ned Alpers, University of California, Los Angeles *In a lively and well-researched narrative Omar H. Ali follows the footsteps of an exceptional man while painting a vivid portrait of a unique and complex society molded by the cultures, languages, and religions of multiple continents. It is a fascinating story of slavery, freedom, power, and transformations. * Sylviane A. Diouf, Director of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery and Curator at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of The New York Public Library *While the story of Malik Ambar's fascinating life is a key to understanding major cultural and political exchanges across the Indian Ocean, it is also the moving and inspiring tale of an African boy who grows up to become an Indian king. This succinct biography by Omar H. Ali allows the reader to plunge into the cosmopolitan world of the Deccan courts, where Abyssinian slaves and noblemen played an important role in political and military affairs. Ambar's talents, which extended from warfare to diplomacy, placed him at the center of events that shaped the seventeenth century. This book adds new perspectives to his early life and to the complex forces that took him across the Indian Ocean, and offers fresh insight into how he found his place in India. * Navina Haidar, Curator, Department of Islamic Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations List of Maps Cast of Characters Acknowedgements About the Author Introduction Chapter 1. Oromo, Abyssinia, and War Chapter 2. Mocha, Baghdad, and Beyond Chapter 3. The Deccan and Military Slavery Chapter 4. Ahmednagar and 'Fidelity to Salt' Chapter 5. Rebels, Regency, and Race Chapter 6. Bargi-Giri, Diplomacy, and Defense Chapter 7. The People and the Battle of Bhatvadi Chapter 8. Justice, Land Reform, and Legacy Chapter 9: Abyssinian Defender of the Deccan Timeline Primary Source Excerpts and Study Questions Further Reading Notes Credits Index

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Book SynopsisDrawing upon unpublished and little-studied photographs of slaves, ex-slaves, and abolitionists, Fox-Amato argues that slavery, abolition, and race in antebellum America cannot be understood without looking at the visual culture photography spawned--or the development of photography without considering how slavery shaped it.Trade ReviewLavishly illustrated, the book...urges historians to rethink the antebellum U.S. as a highly visual society in which people practiced, produced, and consumed photographic images. It similarly demands photo- and art-historians...rethink the political ramifications of early photography.... An original and compelling contribution to nineteenth-century American history, the book channels our view through the photographic lens, which shaped the self-understanding of a young nation approaching conflict. * Carolin Görgen, Revue française d'études américaines *Remarkable and pathbreaking...Fox-Amato's study of the photographic history of slaves and ex-slaves brilliantly assembles disparate bits of visual and textual evidence into telling insights about white American racial stereotypes and black resistance that reverberate into the present. His work shows how difficult it is to get at the truth of the slave experience, and how rewarding it is when the historical and visual detective work is done so thoroughly and effectively. The implications for our own time make reading this visual story difficult but looking away impossible. * Terrie Dopp Aamodt, American Historical Review *An important contribution to the histories of slavery, abolition, visual culture politics, and photography. Moreover, the book's central argumentative thread shows how in the antebellum United States each of these domains were intertwined with the others in more subtle ways... than historians have previously appreciated. Scholars will rightfully be turning to these pages again and again for the important and under-remarked case studies that Fox-Amato brings to light through his deep and creative archival work....This research would be noteworthy on its own, even if it were not also paired in the book with deft storytelling, sensitive analysis, and a real dedication to seeing subtle stories in the materials. * Monica Huerta, New England Quarterly *Exposing Slavery gives some revealing insights on a somewhat overlooked aspect of ideological warfare. * Jon Guttman, Civil War Times *Exposing Slavery is a significant contribution to 19th and 20th -century visual studies examining the relationship between race, representation, and photography. Fox-Amato's book is meticulous research that is well organized and cohesive, managing to cover a great number of themes. * Earnestine Jenkins, Reviews in History *Exposing Slavery deserves rich praise for casting light on the role that photography played in the institution of slavery, and how various agents adopted the photographic lens as a way of identifying themselves and others in line with their ideological perceptions. Fox-Amato engages with an archive that, despite its silences, is richly fleshed out in this text. By unearthing new materials and offering a new framework through which to consider these images and texts, Exposing Slavery will inspire discussion on the nature of photography in the nineteenth century for some time to come. * Emily R. Brady, American Nineteenth Century History *original, richly illustrated, and brilliant book * Library Journal *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1: Policing Personhood Chapter 2: Enduring Images Chapter 3: Realizing Abolition Chapter 4: Domesticating Freedom Epilogue: The Photographic Legacy of American Slavery Notes Bibliography

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Book SynopsisA searing--and sobering--account of the legal and extra-legal means by which systemic white racism has kept Black Americans ''in their place'' from slavery to police and vigilante killings of Black men and women, from 1619 to the present.From the arrival of the first English settlers in America until now-a span of four centuries-a minority of white men have created, managed, and perpetuated their control of every major institution, public and private, in American society. And no group in America has suffered more from the harms imposed by white men''s laws than African Americans, with punishment by law often replaced by extra-legal means. Over the centuries, thousands of victims have been murdered by lynching, white mobs, and appalling massacres.In White Men''s Law, the eminent scholar Peter Irons makes a powerful and persuasive case that African Americans have always been held back by systemic racism in all major institutions that can hold power over them. Based on a wide range of souTrade ReviewThe book Irons' has written is brilliant analysis of just how deep and pervasive our history of racial inequality remains. * William H. Chafe, Journal of Southern History *Table of ContentsPreface: "They've Got Him!" Ch. 1: "Thirty Lashes, Well Laid On" Ch. 2: "Dem Was Hard Times, Sho Nuff" Ch. 3: "Beings of An Inferior Order" Ch. 4: "Fighting For White Supremacy" Ch. 5: "The Foul Odors of Blacks" Ch. 6: "Negroes Plan to Kill All Whites" Ch. 7: "Why Don't Dmocracy Include Me?" Ch 8: "I Thanked God Right Then and There" Ch 9: "War Against the Constitution" Ch 10: "Two Cities-One White, the Other Black" Ch 11: "All Blacks Are Angry" Ch 12: "The Basic Minimal Skills" References

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Trade Review"This magisterial study is a triumph of scholarship....Must reading for anyone interested in American legal history or the Civil War."--Virginia Quarterly Review

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Book SynopsisThis textbook has been designed to confront a central issue in the study of 19th-century Afro-American literature - the question of how to analyse and evaluate the autobiographical tradition of ex-slaves.Trade Review`An imnpressive collection.' New York Times Book Review`This important collection of essays provides the most complete and cogent analysis of the slave narratives to date, and it demonstrates, again, that the narratives had and continue to have many uses ... The essays make a strong case for opening the historical and literary canon to include the slave narratives and testify to their enduring significance.' Library Journal`The Slave's Narrative is the most sophisticated and comprehensive book we have yet on the central issue facing students of 19th Century Afro-American literature: the question of how to analyse and evaluate the autobiographical tradition of ex-slaves. ...it is unlikely that any single collection of essays could do greater justice than The Slave's Tale has to the breadth, vitality, and untapped potential of this topic and the discourse it has generated.'William L. Andrews, University of Wisconsin, (BALF Spring/Summer 1986)Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Language of Slavery, xi 1. Written by Themselves, Views and Reviews, 1750-1861 The Life of Job Ben Solomon, 4 - Anonymous The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African; Written by Himself, 5 The Life and Adventures of a Fugitive Slave, 6 - Anonymous Narrative of James Williams, 8 - Anonymous The Narrative of Juan Manzano, 15 - Anonymous Narratives of Fugitive Slaves, 19 - Ephraim Peabody Life of Henry Bibb, 28 - Anonymous The Life and Bondage of Frederick Douglass, 30 - Anonymous Kidnapped and Ransomed, 31 - - Anonymous Linda: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, 32 - Anonymous 2. The Slave Narratives as History On Dialect Usage, 37 - Sterling A. Brown The Art and Science of Reading WPA Slave Narratives, 40 - Paul D. Escott History from Slave Sources, 48 - C. Vann Woodward Charles Chesnutt and the WPA Narratives: The Oral and the Literate Roots of Afro-American Literature, 59 - John Edgar Wideman Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves: Approaches and Problems, 78 - John W. Blassingame Plantation Factories and the Slave Work Ethic, 98 - Gerald Jaynes The Making of a Fugitive Slave Narrative: Josiah Henson and Uncle Tom -- A Case Study, 112 - Robin W. Winks 3. The Slave Narratives as Literature "I Was Born": Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature, 148 - James Olney Three West African Writers of the 1870s, 175 - Paul Edwards Crushed Geraniums: Juan Francisco Manzano and the Language of Slavery, 199 - Susan Willis I Rose and Found My Voice: Narration, Authentication, and Authorial Control in Four Slave Narratives, 225 - Robert Burns Stepto Autobiographical Acts and the Voice of the Southern Slave, 242 - Houston A. Baker, Jr. Text and Contexts of Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, 262 - Jean Fagan Yellin The Slave Narrators and the Picaresque Mode: Archetypes for Modern Black Personae, 283 - Charles H. Nichols Singing Swords: The Literary Legacy of Slavery, 298 - Melvin Dixon Bibliography, 319 Index, 331

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Book SynopsisThe book represents a close study of slavery in the rice plantations of South Carolina and Georgia. The emphasis is principally on the human relations of slavery, both black and white. The book presents unique insights on how the institution of slavery actually functioned in the Antebellum American South.Trade ReviewThe majority of Dusinberre's research is based upon a careful reading and close analysis of a variety of published sources. Dusinberre's description of life and death at Gowne between 1833 and 1865 constitutes one of the most fully realized and horrific portraits of slavery on a single North American plantation ever written ... Them Dark Days is often so combative and polemical in its interpretation that its author must have expected to provoke controversy. I hope and expect that students of the subject will be reading and debating Them Dark Days for years to come. * Robert Olwell, University of Texas at Austin, Slavery & Abolition, Vol. 18, No. 2, August '97 *The sheer weight of evidence employed to support this thesis is impressive, and sobering ... as the first full-length study devoted to a reassessment of this contentious and important topic, Dusinberre's work stands out as a significant achievement, a timely reminder that even modern assessments of slavery do not yet tell the whole story of 'them dark days' in the antebellum South. * S-M. Grant, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, The Historical Association 1997 *

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Book SynopsisThis text explores the 1823 slave rebellion in Demerara (now Guyana) - one of the largest in history. The 60,000 black slaves who rose up against their British masters were brutally put down. The book looks at the conflict which gave the rebellion life and the forces which finally ended slavery.Trade ReviewIn Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood Emilia Viotti da Costa tells the story of the Demerara slave rebellion of 1823, and she tells it very well. Her narrative, vividly written, utilizes multiple sources to tell the story from different points of view. Her book comes out of a tradition of writing inspired both by marxist and nationalist historiographies and has none of the trappings of a postcolonial text. The older questions of historical determination, of causality and of agency meet the new agendas of cultural history in a deeply satisfying narrative. * History Workshop Journal *

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Book SynopsisCovering the colonial period to the Civil War and spanning all of the northern United States, this text documents the antebellum northern black experience. It demonstrates the central role of the black community in successfully managing the tensions born of assimilation and cultural difference.Trade Reviewwhat makes In Hope of Liberty so stimulating is the juxtaposition of the broad historical sweep with individual experience. * S-M Grant, American Studies, 33:2, 1999. *it is the Horton's ability to pull together such a wide and varied range of individual voices that makes this work so approachable. * S-M Grant, American Studies, 33:2, 1999. *Given the amount of scholarship to-date on the themes of black culture, community and protest, the Hortons have set their sights high in attempting a single-volume study covering all three topics. They have nevertheless succeeded in producing a work of synthesis which is both broad in scope and, most importantly, accessible to a wide readership. * S-M Grant, American Studies, 33:2, 1999. *

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Book SynopsisWhile the rise and abolition of slavery and ongoing race relations are central themes of the history of the United States, the African diaspora actually had a far greater impact on Latin and Central America. More than ten times as many Africans came to Spanish and Portuguese America as the United States. In this, the first history of the African diaspora in Latin America from emancipation to the present, George Reid Andrews deftly synthesizes the history of people of African descent in every Latin American country from Mexico and the Caribbean to Argentina. He examines how African peooples and their descendants made their way from slavery to freedom and how they helped shape and responded to political, economic, and cultural changes in their societies. Individually and collectively they pursued the goals of freedom, equality, and citizenship through military service, political parties, civic organizations, labor unions, religious activity, and other avenues. Spanning two centuries, thiTrade Review...a thoughtful account that should change the way we view and teach the role of Africans in the New World. * Colin M. Maclachlan, Hispanic American Historical Review *Table of ContentsMaps Introduction 1. 1800 2. "An Exterminating Bolt of LIghtning": The Wars for Freedom, 1810-1890 3. "Our New Citizens, the Blacks": The Politics of Freedom, 1810-1890 4. "A Transfusion of New Blood": Whitening, 1880-1930 5. Browning and Blackening, 1930-2000 6. Into the Twenty-First Century: 2000 and Beyond Appendix: Population Counts, 1800-2000 Glossary Notes Selected Bibliography Index

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