Frederick Douglass was born enslaved in February 1818, but from this most humble of beginnings, he rose to become a world-famous orator, newspaper editor, and champion of the rights of women and African Americans.
Recent scholarship on slavery and politics between 1776 and 1840 has wholly revised historians' understanding of the problem of slavery in American politics.
Throughout the Civil War, newspaper headlines and stories repeatedly asked some variation of the question posed by the New York Times in 1862, "e;What shall we do with the negro?
For readers of such crusading works of nonfiction as Katherine Boo’s Beyond the Beautiful Forevers and Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains comes a powerful and captivating examination of two entwined global crises: environmental destruction and human trafficking—and an inspiring, bold plan for how we can solve them.
Spectacular Suffering focuses on commodification and discipline, two key dimensions of Atlantic slavery through which black bodies were turned into things in the marketplace and persons into property on plantations.
In this pathbreaking new work, Vitor Izecksohn attempts to shed new light on the American Civil War by comparing it to a strikingly similar campaign in South America--the War of the Triple Alliance of 1864-70, which galvanized four countries and became the longest large-scale international conflict in the history of the Americas.
This detailed biography gives a portrait of the life of Daniel Alexander Payne, a free person of color in nineteenth century Charleston, South Carolina.
Slavery on the Periphery traces the rise and fall of chattel slavery on the Kansas-Missouri border from the earliest years of American settlement through the Civil War, exploring how its presence shaped life on this critical geographical, political, and social fault line.
City of Refuge is a story of petit marronage, an informal slave's economy, and the construction of internal improvements in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina.
In Complexion of Empire in Natchez, Christian Pinnen examines slavery in the colonial South, using a variety of legal records and archival documents to investigate how bound labor contributed to the establishment and subsequent control of imperial outposts in colonial North America.
From the 1787 Wedgwood antislavery medallion featuring the image of an enchained and pleading black body to Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012) and Steve McQueen's Twelve Years a Slave (2013), slavery as a system of torture and bondage has fascinated the optical imagination of the transatlantic world.
Slavery on the Periphery traces the rise and fall of chattel slavery on the Kansas-Missouri border from the earliest years of American settlement through the Civil War, exploring how its presence shaped life on this critical geographical, political, and social fault line.
From the 1787 Wedgwood antislavery medallion featuring the image of an enchained and pleading black body to Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012) and Steve McQueen's Twelve Years a Slave (2013), slavery as a system of torture and bondage has fascinated the optical imagination of the transatlantic world.
More than the story of one man's case, this book tells the story of entire generations of people marked as "e;mixed race"e; in America amid slavery and its aftermath, and being officially denied their multicultural identity and personal rights as a result.
This singular reference provides an authoritative account of the daily lives of enslaved women in the United States, from colonial times to emancipation following the Civil War.
'I 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.
The Confederate army went to war to defend a nation of slaveholding states, and although men rushed to recruiting stations for many reasons, they understood that the fundamental political issue at stake in the conflict was the future of slavery.
In this powerful memoir, Charles Dew, one of America's most respected historians of the South--and particularly its history of slavery--turns the focus on his own life, which began not in the halls of enlightenment but in a society unequivocally committed to segregation.
Recent scholarship on slavery and politics between 1776 and 1840 has wholly revised historians' understanding of the problem of slavery in American politics.
Christa Dierksheide argues that "e;enlightened"e; slaveowners in the British Caribbean and the American South, neither backward reactionaries nor freedom-loving hypocrites, thought of themselves as modern, cosmopolitan men with a powerful alternative vision of progress in the Atlantic world.
The long history and lasting impact of the rhetoric of Black exclusion in American politics and cultureIn 1787, Thomas Jefferson declared that the United States was destined to become a nation free of slavery-and of its entire Black population.
Chronicles the history of emancipation through the cradle-to-grave experiences of a remarkable generation of black northernersThe Rising Generation chronicles the long history of emancipation in the United States through the cradle-to-grave experiences of a generation of black New Yorkers.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE DIVERSE BOOK AWARDS 2026Bracing and essential, a radical reframing of British Romanticism through the lens of Black experience for fans of David Olusoga, Gretchen Gerzina, Saidiya Hartman and Emma Dabiri A masterpiece about how history is made, written with power and ferocity Boston GlobeWordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats the Romantic poets are titans of English literature, taught and celebrated around the world.
