Countering the idea that slaves were unprepared for freedom, this groundbreaking study argues that slaves built an ethos of "honest labor" and collective humanism in the face of oppression-an ethos that has been taken up by generations of African Americans as a foundation for citizenship and participation in democracy. Known for My Work presents an intellectual and social history of slave thought from the late antebellum era through Reconstruction, labor organizing in the 1930s and 1940s, the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and the reparations movement of the twentyfirst century. Arguing that enslaved laborers thought for themselves, imagined themselves, and made themselves, and that their descendants have shared this moral legacy, Lynda Morgan offers an unprecedented view of African America.

In Known for My Work, Lynda Morgan looks beyond slavery's legacy of racial and economic inequality and counters the idea that slaves were unprepared for freedom. By examining African American social and intellectual thought, Morgan highlights how slaves built an ethos of "honest labor" and collective humanism. As moral economists, slaves and their descendants insisted that economic motives formed the foundation of their exploitation and made sophisticated arguments about the appropriate role of labor in a just and democratic society. Morgan considers how slaves evaluated the violence, coercions, and deceits employed by slaveholders as means to maintain power, as well as the ways in which fugitive slaves active in the abolition movement stressed to nonslaveholding audiences how they were complicit in a regime fraught with moral decay. She also points to the racial rhetoric of Jim Crow architects and how it was readily identified as elaborating on slave-era racial propaganda in new ways for an old reason: to establish a rigid economic inequality in the Industrial Revolution. From the late antebellum era through Reconstruction, labor organizing in the 1930s and 1940s, the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and the reparations movement of the twenty-first century, Morgan offers an unprecedented view of African America. What emerges from the literature is a clear critique of racism, an embrace of self-defense, and the belief that they deserved reparations for lost labor. Enslaved laborers thought for themselves, imagined themselves, and made themselves. Moreover, their descendants share this moral legacy as a foundation for citizenship and participation in democracy.

"Darkroom: A Family Exposure" is Jill Christman's gripping, funny, and wise account of her first thirty years. Although her story runs the gamut of dramatic life events, including childhood sexual abuse, accidental death, and psychological trauma, Christman's poignant memoir is much more than a litany of horrors; instead, it is an open-eyed, wide-hearted, and good-humored look at a life worth surviving.

Through a shifting narrative of text and photographs, Christman explores the intersection of image and memory and considers the ways photographs force us to rework our original memories. "Darkroom" is a page-turning and disturbing journey that begins with an older brother's near fatal burning and progresses through a counterculture childhood in which her free-spirited mother moves the family to an isolated mountaintop. The story advances into an adolescence of eating disorders and barely remembered sex, slams into a young adulthood of love, literature, drugs, death, and therapists, and ends soon after a beloved uncle bleeds to death in a federal prison while serving a ten-year sentence for growing marijuana.

Never sentimental, Jill Christman is brutally honest and surprisingly funny. She deftly blends narrative, quoted materials, her uncle's letters, and her father's photography to create a family saga that is both heartbreaking and exhilarating.