**LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE** A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, OPRAH BOOK CLUB PICK AND BARACK OBAMA SUMMER READING 2021 SELECTION 'A fine, lyrical novel, impressive in its complex interweaving of the grand and the intimate, of the personal and political' Observer Landry and Prentiss are two brothers born into slavery, finally freed as the American Civil War draws to its bitter close. Cast into the world without a penny to their names, their only hope is to find work in a society that still views them with nothing but intolerance. Farmer George Walker and his wife Isabelle are reeling from a loss that has shaken them to their core. After a chance encounter, they agree to employ the brothers on their land, and slowly the tentative bonds of trust begin to blossom between the strangers. But this sanctuary survives on a knife's edge, and it isn't long before a tragedy causes the inhabitants of the nearby town to turn their suspicion onto these new friendships, with devastating consequences. '[A] highly accomplished debut' Sunday Times Readers have been swept away by The Sweetness of Water: 'Such a powerful, magnificent book; I urge you to read it. The comparisons with Colson Whitehead are justified' ***** 'A staggering debut and a story that stays with you' ***** 'Thought-provoking and moving . . . a gripping and compelling novel that exposes flaws, mixed emotions and imperfect relationships, and yet it holds on with determination and hope. It fully deserves a 5-star rating' ***** 'Outstanding . . . A book that deserves widespread recognition and a wide audience' *****

Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution,the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told , the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy. Told through intimate slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history. Winner of the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American HistoriansWinner of the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize Bloomberg View Top Ten Nonfiction Books of 2014 Daily Beast Best Nonfiction Books of 2014

Get the lowdown on America's Bloodiest War-the Civil War-with this essential guide to 101 interesting and unexpected facts about this defining event in US history. Do you know which state first seceded from the Union? What about the individual who could be considered the Mata Hari of the Civil War? Or how about which Bible passage Southerners used to justify slavery? You'll find answers to these questions and many, many more in 101 Things You Didn't Know about the Civil War. Packed with fascinating details about the people, places, and events that defined our nation's most contentious conflict, this tell-all guide reveals the inside scoop on slavery and its impact on the war; great-and not-so-great-leaders and generals; battles fought and lost-and fought again; some of the most shocking horrors of the war; women, children, and African Americans in the war. Complete with a helpful timeline, 101 Things You Didn't Know about the Civil War is your go-to guide for little-known facts about the war that dramatically altered the course of American history forever.

The memoir of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall offers today's activists and readers an accessible and intimate examination of a crucial era in American radical history. Born in 1929 New Orleans to left-wing Jewish parents, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall's life has spanned nearly a century of engagement in anti-racist, internationalist political activism. In this moving and instructive chronicle of her remarkable life, Midlo Hall recounts her experiences as an anti-racist activist, a Communist Party militant, and a scholar of slavery in the Americas, as well as the wife and collaborator of the renowned African-American author and Communist leader Harry Haywood. Telling the story of her life against the backdrop of the important political and social developments of the 20th century, Midlo Hall offers new insights about a critical period in the history of labor and civil rights movements in the United States. Detailing everything from Midlo Hall's co-founding of the only inter-racial youth organization in the South when she was 16-years-old, to her pioneering work establishing digital slave databases, to her own struggles against cruel and pervasive sexism, Haunted by Slavery is a gripping account of a life defined by profound dedication to a cause.

Provides a comprehensive overview of 10 major slave revolts and examines how those uprisings and conspiracies impacted slaveholding colonies and states from 1663 to 1861. Hundreds of slave revolts and conspiracies occurred during the two centuries that North America engaged in slavery. None were successful, but certain campaigns were significant enough to inspire other revolts, fuel a chronic fear of uprising in slaveholders and politicians, and keep alive the perennial desire for freedom felt by black slaves. Kerry Walters examines 10 representative revolts and offers narratives, primary materials, chronologies and biographies of participants for high school and undergraduate students. The book also contains an annotated bibliography of print and online primary and secondary sources for students seeking material for research papers and projects, as well as an examination of fictional depictions of slave revolts in novels and film. Walters offers information on a compelling topic that will be of interest to students of American history or sociology as well as anyone engaging in multicultural studies. Offers an overview of American slave revolts and conspiracies to revolt Explores the context of chronic fear of uprising in slaveholding colonies and states in North America from 1663 to 1861 Offers accounts gleaned from primary resources regarding slave leaders and their lieutenants, and of the trials that condemned them Describes the climate of fear in which slaveholding whites lived, as well as the various social practices and legal statutes they enacted to minimize the risk of slave revolt Includes a narrative, primary materials, biographics, a chronology, and an annotated bibliography-all of which will be helpful to students writing papers on the topic

Free Soil in the Atlantic World examines the principle that slaves who crossed particular territorial frontiers- from European medieval cities to the Atlantic nation states of the nineteenth century- achieved their freedom. Based upon legislation and judicial cases, each essay considers the legal origins of Free Soil and the context in which it was invoked: medieval England, Toulouse and medieval France, early modern France and the Mediterranean, the Netherlands, eighteenth-century Portugal, nineteenth-century Angola, nineteenth-century Spain and Cuba, and the Brazilian-Paraguay borderlands. On the one hand, Free Soil policies were deployed by weaker polities to attract worker-settlers; however, by the eighteenth century, Free Soil was increasingly invoked by European imperial centres to distinguish colonial regimes based in slavery from the privileges and liberties associated with the metropole.

This book was originally published as a special issue of "Slavery and Abolition."

Moving between Britain and Jamaica this book reconstructs the world of commerce, consumption and cultivation sustained through an extended engagement with the business of slavery. Transatlantic slavery was both shaping of and shaped by the dynamic networks of family that established Britain's Caribbean empire. Tracing the activities of a single extended family - the Hibberts - this book explores how slavery impacted on the social, cultural, economic and political landscape of Britain. It is a history of trade, colonisation, enrichment and the tangled web of relations that gave meaning to the transatlantic world. The Hibberts's trans-generational story imbricates the personal and the political, the private and the public, the local and the global. It is both the intimate narrative of a family and an analytical frame through which to explore Britain's history and legacies of slavery. -- .

"This may be the most important story ever written by a slave woman, capturing as it does the gross indignities as well as the subtler social arrangements of the time."-Kirkus Review "Of female slave narratives, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself is the crowning achievement. Manifesting a command of rhetorical and narrative strategies rivaled only by that of Frederick Douglass, Jacobs's autobiography is one of the major works of Afro-American literature"-Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Incidents In the Life of a Slave Girl, the autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, was initially written with the intention of illuminating white abolitionists to the appalling treatment of female slaves in the pre-Civil War South of the United States. The book was later rediscovered in the 1960's, and it was not until the 1980s that it was proved to be an extraordinary work of autobiographical memoir as opposed to fiction. In this astonishing book, Harriet Jacobs uses the pseudonym of Linda Brent to recount her story as a slave, a mother, and her eventual escape to the north. Born into a relatively calm life as a young child to slaves, she is taken into the care of a kind mistress when her mother dies. Linda is taught to read and write, and is generally treated with respect. When the mistress passes away Linda is handed over to Dr. Flint. He is a negligent and cruel new master who subsequently pressures Linda for sexual favors, yet she resists his demands for years. In an attempt to circumvent the situation, Linda enters into a relationship with Mr. Sands, a white neighbor who ends up fathering her two children. Expecting that she and her children will be sold to Mr. Sands, Dr. Flint instead decides to subject them to further degradation. Linda escapes and goes into hiding in a small attic, and her children are eventually sold to Mr. Sand. For over seven years, Linda remains in hiding, until she ultimately escapes North to be reunited with her children. Incidents In the Life of a Slave Girl is a devastating yet empowering document that uniquely focuses on the psychological and spiritual effects that bondage had on women slaves and their families. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is both modern and readable.

This book provides a fresh overall account of organised antislavery by focusing on the active minority of abolutionists throughout the country. The analysis of their culture of reform demonstrates the way in which alliances of diverse religious groups roused public opinion and influenced political leaders. The resulting definition of the distinctive `reform mentality' links antislavery to other efforts at moral and social improvement and highlights its contradictory relations to the social effects of industrialization and the growth of liberalism.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award "Impeccably researched and seductively readable...tells the story of Sam Sharpe's revolution manque, and the subsequent abolition of slavery in Jamaica, in a way that's acutely relevant to the racial unrest of our own time." -Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls' Rising The final uprising of enslaved people in Jamaica started as a peaceful labor strike a few days shy of Christmas in 1831. A harsh crackdown by white militias quickly sparked a full-blown revolt, leaving hundreds of plantation houses in smoking ruins. The rebels lost their daring bid for freedom, but their headline-grabbing defiance triggered a decisive turn against slavery. Island on Fire is a dramatic day-by-day account of these transformative events. A skillful storyteller, Tom Zoellner uses diaries, letters, and colonial records to tell the intimate story of the men and women who rose up and briefly tasted liberty. He brings to life the rebellion's enigmatic leader, the preacher Samuel Sharpe, and shows how his fiery resistance turned the tide of opinion in London and hastened the end of slavery in the British Empire. "Zoellner's vigorous, fast-paced account brings to life a varied gallery of participants...The revolt failed to improve conditions for the enslaved in Jamaica, but it crucially wounded the institution of slavery itself." -Fergus M. Bordewich, Wall Street Journal "It's high time that we had a book like the splendid one Tom Zoellner has written: a highly readable but carefully documented account of the greatest of all British slave rebellions, the miseries that led to it, and the momentous changes it wrought." -Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains

Henry Box Brown is well-known in America for remarkably escaping slavery by being nailed up in a box and posted from Virginia to Philadelphia. The passing of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 made it unsafe for Brown to remain in America so he relocated to England. There, he had a very successful career, initially as a speaker on abolitionism, before he began speaking on other subjects and then branched out into other forms of entertainment including as a magician. He married again to Jane Floyd, who, along with their children, appeared in his acts. With his wife and surviving children, he returned to America in 1875 finally moving to Canada, where he died. This book tells his story, concentrating on the relatively unknown period of his life in Britain, detailing both how he was received and how he developed as a performer. It is the biography of a brave, intelligent individualist who was always willing to learn and to take chances, becoming the first black man to achieve landmarks in British law and entertainment.

A new history of the abolition of the British slave trade "Easily the most scholarly, clear and persuasive analysis yet published of the rise to dominance of the British in the Atlantic slave trade-as well as the implementation of abolition when that dominance was its peak."-David Eltis, co-author of Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Parliament's decision in 1807 to outlaw British slaving was a key moment in modern world history. In this magisterial work, historian David Richardson challenges claims that this event was largely due to the actions of particular individuals and emphasizes instead that abolition of the British slave trade relied on the power of ordinary people to change the world. British slaving and opposition to it grew in parallel through the 1760s and then increasingly came into conflict both in the public imagination and in political discourse. Looking at the ideological tensions between Britons' sense of themselves as free people and their willingness to enslave Africans abroad, Richardson shows that from the 1770s those simmering tensions became politicized even as British slaving activities reached unprecedented levels, mobilizing public opinion to coerce Parliament to confront and begin to resolve the issue between 1788 and 1807.

They Knew Lincoln, first published in 1942, captures impressions of Abraham Lincoln by African Americans who personally knew and interacted with him in Springfield, Illinois, and Washington, DC. Dr. John Washington, an African American collector of Lincoln memorabilia, who grew up in the shadow of Ford's Theatre in the late 19th century, gathered stories through personal interviews with Lincoln's African American acquaintances or their children. They include Lincoln's barbers, White House servants, waiters, doorkeepers and others. A large section is devoted to Mary Lincoln's African American seamstress and confidant Elizabeth Keckley. Washington conducted research in collections across the Southeast and Midwest; he interviewed elderly African Americans in Washington, Maryland, and Virginia; and he reached out to the foremost Lincoln scholars and collectors of his era, hoping for new leads and new information. This remarkable book was originally published by E.P. Dutton, including a strong introduction by the famed poet and Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg. The "collection of Negro stories, memories, legends about Lincoln" seemed "to fill such an obvious gap in the material about Lincoln that one wonders why no one ever did it before." Even in the twenty-first century, They Knew Lincoln remains unsurpassed as a study of the African Americans who knew Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln. In recent years historians have regularly turned to Washington's book as a crucial source of information about the Lincolns' domestic world and about black Washington in the Civil War era. Yet the book has never been reprinted and remains largely unavailable. This reissue reproduces the original text in full and the rare photos that appeared in the original book (as well as some additional ones of John E. Washington), along with a significant original essay by Kate Masur about the publication of the book, its author, and the subjects covered by this unusual work.

A study of slave memory in South Africa using feminist, postcolonial and memory studies.

Much has been made about South Africa's transition from histories of colonialism, slavery and apartheid. 'Memory' features prominently in the country's reckoning with its pasts. While there has been an outpouring of academic essays, anthologies and other full-length texts which study this transition, most have focused on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

What Is Slavery To Me? is the first full-length study of slave memory in the South African context, and examines the relevance and effects of slave memory for contemporary negotiations of South African gendered and racialised identities. It draws from feminist, postcolonial and memory studies and is therefore interdisciplinary in approach. It reads memory as one way of processing this past, and interprets a variety of cultural, literary and filmic texts to ascertain the particular experiences in relation to slave pasts being fashioned, processed and disseminated. Much of the material surveyed across disciplines attributes to memory, or 'popular history making', a dialogue between past and present whilst ascribing sense to both the eras and their relationship. In this sense then, memory is active, entailing a personal relationship with the past which acts as mediator of reality on a day to day basis.

The projects studies various negotiations of raced and gendered identities in creative and other public spaces in contemporary South Africa, by being particularly attentive to the encoding of consciousness about the country's slave past. This book extends memory studies in South Africa, provokes new lines of inquiry, and develops new frameworks through which to think about slavery and memory in South Africa.

This book focuses on British efforts to suppress the traffic in female slaves destined for Egyptian harems during the late nineteenth century. It considers this campaign in relation to gender debates in England, and examines the ways in which the assumptions and dominant imperialist discourses of these abolitionists were challenged by the newly established Muslim communities in England, as well as by English people who converted to or were sympathetic with Islam. While previous scholars treated antislavery activity in Egypt first and foremost as an extension of earlier efforts to abolish plantation slavery in the New World, this book considers it in terms of encounters with Islam during a period which it argues marked a new departure in Anglo-Muslim relations. This approach illuminates the role of Islam in the creation of English national identities within the global cultural system of the British Empire. This book will appeal to those with an interest in British imperial history; Islam; gender, feminism and women's studies; slavery and race; the formation of national identities; global processes; Orientalism; and Middle Eastern studies. -- .

A comprehensive bibliography dealing specifically with African slave trade. This volume has been sub-classified for easier consultation and the compiler has provided, where possible, descriptions and comments on the works listed.

In recent years, stories of religious universities and institutions grappling with their slave-owning past have made headlines in the news. People find it shocking that the Church itself could have been involved in such a sordid business. This timely book, the result of many years of research, is a study of the origins of this problem. Mary E. Sommar examines how the church sought to establish norms for slave ownership on the part of ecclesiastical institutions and personnel, and for others' behavior towards such slaves. The story begins in the New Testament era, when the earliest Christian norms were established, and continues up to thirteenth-century establishment of a body of canon law that would persist into the twentieth century. Along with her analysis of the various policies and statutes, Sommar draws on chronicles, letters, and other documents from each of the various historical periods to provide insight into the situations of unfree ecclesiastical dependents. She finds that unfree dependents of the Church actually had less chance of achieving freedom than did the slaves of other masters. The church authorities' duty to preserve the Church's patrimony for the needs of future generations led them to hold on tightly to their unfree human resources. This accessibly written book does not present an apology for the behavior of past Christian leaders, but attempts to learn what they did and to arrive at some understanding of why they made those choices.

From David Brion Davis's The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution to Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, some of the most influential conceptualizations of the Atlantic World have taken the movements of individuals and transnational organizations working to advocate the abolition of slavery as their material basis. This unique, interdisciplinary collection of essays provides diverse new approaches to examining the abolitionist Atlantic. With contributions from an international roster of historians, literary scholars, and specialists in the history of art, this book provides case studies in the connections between abolitionism and material spatial practice in literature, theory, history and memory. This volume covers a wide range of topics and themes, including the circum-Atlantic itineraries of abolitionist artists and activists; precise locations such as Paris and Chatham, Ontario where abolitionists congregated to speculate over the future of, and hatch emigration plans to, sites in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean; and the reimagining of abolitionist places in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and public art. This book was originally published as a special issue of Atlantic Studies.

First Published in 1966. Following on from his book 'The Establishment of Spanish Rule in America', published in 1898, the present writer gave some account of the origin and earlier history of the institutions framed for the government of Spanish America. This volume aims to present some phases of colonial history and social organization in the last part of the eighteenth century, particularly as they appear in the southern half of South America.

Focusing on the agency of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the South, this work argues for the systematic unveiling and recovery of subjugated knowledge, histories, and cultural practices of those traditionally silenced and overlooked by national heritage projects and national public memories. Jackson uses both ethnographic and ethnohistorical data to show the various ways African Americans actively created and maintained their own heritage and cultural formations. Viewed through the lens of four distinctive plantation sites--including the one on which that the ancestors of First Lady Michelle Obama lived--everyday acts of living, learning, and surviving profoundly challenge the way American heritage has been constructed and represented. A fascinating, critical view of the ways culture, history, social policy, and identity influence heritage sites and the business of heritage research management in public spaces.

Frederick Douglass was born a slave in Talbot County, Maryland, in February, 1818. From these humble beginnings, Douglass went on to become a world-famous orator, newspaper editor, and champion of the rights of women and African Americans. He was the most prominent African American activist of the 19th century. He remains important in American history because he moved beyond relief at his own personal freedom to dedicating his life to the progress of his race and his country. This volume offers a short biographical exploration of Douglass' life in the broader context of the 19th century world, and pulls together some of his most important writings on slavery, civil rights, and political issues. Bolstered by the series website, which provides instructors with more images and documents, as well as targeted links to further research, Frederick Douglass: Reformer and Statesman gives the student of American history a fully-rounded glimpse into the world inhabited by this great figure.

In the early modern period, hundreds of thousands of Europeans, both male and female, were abducted by pirates, sold on the slave market, and enslaved in North Africa. Between the sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, pirates from Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco not only attacked sailors and merchants in the Mediterranean but also roved as far as Iceland. A substantial number of the European captives who later returned home from the Barbary Coast, as maritime North Africa was then called, wrote and published accounts of their experiences. These popular narratives greatly influenced the development of the modern novel and autobiography, and they also shaped European perceptions of slavery as well as of the Muslim world. Barbary Captives brings together a selection of early modern slave narratives in English translation for the first time. It features accounts written by men and women across three centuries and in nine different languages that recount the experience of capture and servitude in North Africa. These texts tell the stories of Christian pirates, Christian rowers on Muslim galleys, house slaves in the palaces of rulers, domestic servants, agricultural slaves, renegades, and social climbers in captivity. They also depict liberation through ransom, escape, or religious conversion. This book sheds new light on the social history of Mediterranean slavery and piracy, early modern concepts of unfree labor, and the evolution of the Barbary captivity narrative as a literary and historical genre.

In the decade before the Civil War, Concord, Massachusetts, was a center of abolitionist sentiment and activism. To Set this World Right is the first book to recover and examine the voices, events, and influence of the antebellum antislavery movement in Concord. In addressing fundamental questions about the origin and nature of radical abolitionism in this most American of towns, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis frames the antislavery ideology of Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson-two of Concord's most famous residents-as a product of family and community activism and presents the civic context in which their outspoken abolitionism evolved. In this historic locale, radical abolitionism crossed racial, class, and gender lines as a confederation of neighbors fomented a radical consciousness, and Petrulionis documents how the Thoreaus, Emersons, and Alcotts worked in tandem with others in their community, including a slaveowner's daughter and a former slave. Additionally, she examines the basis on which Henry Thoreau-who cherished nothing more than solitary tramps through his beloved woods and bogs-has achieved lasting fame as a militant abolitionist. This book marshals rich archival evidence of the diverse tactics exploited by a small coterie of committed activists, largely women, who provoked their famous neighbors to action. In Concord, the fugitive slave Shadrach Minkins was clothed and fed as he made his way to freedom. In Concord, the adolescent daughters of John Brown attended school and recovered from their emotional distress after their father's notorious public hanging. Although most residents of the town maintained a practiced detachment from the plight of the enslaved, women and men whose sole objective was the moral urgency of abolishing slavery at last prevailed on the philosophers of self-culture to accept the responsibility of their reputations.

By the election year of 1844, Joseph Smith, the controversial founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had amassed a national following of some 25,000 believers. Nearly half of them lived in the city of Nauvoo, Illinois, where Smith was not only their religious leader but also the mayor and the commander-in-chief of a militia of some 2,500 men. In less than twenty years, Smith had helped transform the American religious landscape and grown his own political power substantially. Yet the standing of the Mormon people in American society remained unstable. Unable to garner federal protection, and having failed to win the support of former president Martin Van Buren or any of the other candidates in the race, Smith decided to take matters into his own hands, launching his own bid for the presidency. While many scoffed at the notion that Smith could come anywhere close to the White House, others regarded his run-and his religion-as a threat to the stability of the young nation. Hounded by mobs throughout the campaign, Smith was ultimately killed by one-the first presidential candidate to be assassinated. Though Joseph Smith's run for president is now best remembered-when it is remembered at all-for its gruesome end, the renegade campaign was revolutionary. Smith called for the total abolition of slavery, the closure of the country's penitentiaries, and the reestablishment of a national bank to stabilize the economy. But Smith's most important proposal was for an expansion of protections for religious minorities. At a time when the Bill of Rights did not apply to individual states, Smith sought to empower the federal government to protect minorities when states failed to do so. Spencer W. McBride tells the story of Joseph Smith's quixotic but consequential run for the White House and shows how his calls for religious freedom helped to shape the American political system we know today.

Perhaps no other crusade in the history of the U.S. provoked so much passion and fury as the struggle over slavery. Many of the problems that were a part of that great debate are still with us. Louis Filler has brought together much information both known and new on those who organized to defeat slavery. He has also re-examined the anti-slavery movement's ideals, heroes, and martyrs with historical perspective and precision. Contrary to popular belief, the anti-slavery movement was far from united. It included abolitionists as well as a variety of reformers whose activities place them among the anti-slavery forces. These included men as different in background and temperament as William Lloyd Garrison and John Quincy Adams. Portraits of the many protagonists, their hardships, and their quarrels with Southerners and Northerners alike, bring to life this exciting and tumultuous period. Filler also examines the many related reform movements that characterized the period: feminism, spiritualism, utopian societies, and educational reform. The volume traces the relationship of the antislavery movement to abolition and probes their connection with the several reforms that dominated the period. He brilliantly recaptures a sense of the contemporary consequences of the reformers efforts. This is an absorbing and important survey of the problems--political, social, and economic--that made this period so crucial in the history of the U.S.