This volume has brought together scholars from anthropology, history, psychology, and ethnic studies to share their original research into the lesser-known stories of slavery in North America and reveal surprising parallels among slave cultures across the continent. Although they focus on North America, these scholars also take a broad view of slavery as a global historical phenomenon and describe how coercers and the coerced, as well as outside observers, have understood what it means to be a “slave” in various times and cultures, including in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The contributors explore the links between indigenous customs of coercion before European contact, those of the tumultuous colonial era, some of the less-familiar paradigms of slavery before the Civil War, and the hazy legal borders between voluntary and involuntary servitude today. The breadth of the chapters complements and enhances traditional scholarship that has focused on slavery in the colonial and nineteenth-century South, and the contributors find the connections among the many histories of slavery in order to provide a better understanding of the many ways in which coercion and slavery worked across North America and continue to work today.

Follow Sonny, A Funny Bunny, on a journey where he finds a treasure and discovers vegetables aren't so bad after all.

Gifted journalist Cass Roberts enjoys her well-ordered life in San Francisco, yet the recent departure of her fickle lover has left her yearning for a man to be her life partner, one who will complement her zest for adventure and her creative spirit. When she leaves her San Francisco coterie of would-be partners and travels to her childhood home in Oregon, she enjoys long afternoons taping her family's stories as recalled by her Aunt Gin and unexpectedly meets Phil, a local man of many talents who arouses Cass's romantic interest.

In the lush Oregon woods, Cass reluctantly begins to open herself to new experiences and to romance. Yet her dreams become ever more disturbing, especially as she learns about a distant relative named Emmeline, who married against her parents' wishes and whose body was never found after the massive earthquake of 1906. This mystery pervades Cass's violent dreams and leads her to challenging adventures and entirely new ways of envisioning her life, her dreams, and her love.

By combining romance and an intriguing mystery, "Magnitude 8.3" shares the thrilling tale of one woman's relentless pursuit of self-discovery and of a love to last through the ages.