Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

How the Word Is Passed - Carton of 10 Signed Copies (Special Markets)

Clint Smith

How the Word Is Passed

Clint Smith III, Clint Smith · 344 pages

How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith

Malcolm Washington · 341 pages

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates · 155 pages

An Amazon Best Book of July 2015: Readers of his work in The Atlantic and elsewhere know Ta-Nehisi Coates for his thoughtful and influential writing on race in America. Written as a series of letters to his teenaged son, his new memoir, Between the World and Me, walks us through the course of his life, from the tough neighborhoods of Baltimore in his youth, to Howard University—which Coates dubs “

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

Nikole Hannah-Jones · 590 pages

Up from Slavery

Booker T. Washington · 192 pages

Booker T. Washington, the most recognized national leader, orator and educator, emerged from slavery in the deep south, to work for the betterment of African Americans in the post Reconstruction period. "Up From Slavery" is an autobiography of Booker T. Washington's life and work, which has been the source of inspiration for all Americans. Washington reveals his inner most thoughts as he transi

The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Narrative

Mary Prince · 72 pages

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass · 570 pages

"Born and raised a slave, Frederick Douglass (1817?-1895) made two escape attempts before reaching freedom, educated himself against all odds, and became a leading abolitionist and spokesperson for African Americans." "My Bondage and My freedom is his account of his life, and that of slaves generally, in antebellum Maryland. Just as impressive as Douglass's gift for conveying the stark terrors and

Behind the Scenes Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House

Elizabeth Keckley · 172 pages

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Harriet Jacobs · 228 pages

The true story of an individual's struggle for self-identity, self-preservation, and freedom, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl remains among the few extant slave narratives written by a woman. This autobiographical account chronicles the remarkable odyssey of Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) whose dauntless spirit and faith carried her from a life of servitude and degradation in North Carolina to l

Narrative of Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth, Olive Gilbert · 144 pages

"A symbol of the strength of African-American women, and a champion of the rights of all women, Sojourner Truth was an illiterate former slave named Isabella who became a vastly powerful orator. Dictated to a neighbor and first published in 1850, Truth's celebrated story chronicles her life as a slave in New York State, her 1827 emancipation under state law, her religious experiences and her trans

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave / Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs · 190 pages

Twelve Years a Slave

Solomon Northup · 228 pages

Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation.

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

Ira Berlin · 504 pages

Today most Americans, black and white, identify slavery with cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after almost two hundred years of African-American life in mainland North America, few slaves grew cotton, lived in the deep South, or embraced Christianity. Many Thousands Gone traces the evolution of black society from the first arr

Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made

Eugene D. Genovese · 823 pages

This landmark history of slavery in the South -- a winner of the Bancroft Prize -- challenged conventional views of slaves by illuminating the many forms of resistance to dehumanization that developed in slave society. Rather than emphasizing the cruelty and degradation of slavery, historian Eugene Genovese investigates the ways that slaves forced their owners to acknowledge their humanity through

The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832

Alan Taylor · 624 pages

Frederick Douglass recalled that slaves living along Chesapeake Bay longingly viewed sailing ships as "freedom's swift-winged angels." In 1813 those angels appeared in the bay as British warships coming to punish the Americans for declaring war on the empire. Over many nights, hundreds of slaves paddled out to the warships seeking protection for their families from the ravages of slavery. The runa

The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South

Kenneth M. Stampp · 435 pages

In ten sparkling chapters the book details and illuminates every aspect of slavery....Slavery is viewed not as a method of regulating race relations, not as an arrangement that was in its essence paternalistic, but as a practical system of controlling and exploiting labor. How the slaves worked, how they resisted bondage, how they were disciplined, how they lived their lives in the quarters, and h

Bury the Chains

Adam Hochschild · 466 pages

An account of the first great human rights crusade, which originated in England in the 1780s and resulted in the freeing of hundreds of thousands of slaves around the world. In 1787, twelve men gathered in a London printing shop to pursue a seemingly impossible goal: ending slavery in the largest empire on earth. Along the way, they would pioneer most of the tools citizen activists still rely on t

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

David Brion Davis · 440 pages

"Davis begins with the dramatic Amistad case, which vividly highlights the international character of the Atlantic slave trade and the roles of the American judiciary, the presidency, the media, and both black and white abolitionists. The heart of the book looks at slavery in the American South, describing black slaveholding planters; the rise of the Cotton Kingdom; the daily life of ordinary slav

When I Was a Slave: Memoirs from the Slave Narrative Collection

Norman R. Yetman · 157 pages

A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons

Elizabeth Dowling Taylor · 316 pages

Chronicles the life of a former slave to James and Dolley Madison, tracing his early years on their plantation, his service in the White House household staff and post-emancipation achievements as a memoirist.

The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion

Stephen B. Oates · 208 pages

Portrays America's most famous slave rebel and the insurrection he led in southeastern Virginia's Southampton County in August, 1831.

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

Edward E. Baptist · 543 pages

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 prizewinning *The Half Has Never Been Told*, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American inde

In the Shadow of Liberty: The Hidden History of Slavery, Four Presidents, and Five Black Lives

Kenneth C. Davis · 295 pages

Here are the stories of five enslaved people who witnessed the birth of America: Billy Lee, valet to George Washington; Ona Judge, who escaped from Martha Washington; Isaac Granger, servant of Thomas Jefferson; Paul Jennings, who witnessed the War of 1812 in James Madison's White House; and Alfred Jackson, "owned" by Andrew Jackson. These true stories explore our country's great, tragic contradict