'The year was 1899; the place a sweltering tobacco farm in Truevine, Virginia. One day a white man offered candy to George and Willie Muse, two little sons of sharecroppers. Captured into the circus, the brothers would perform for British Royalty and headline shows at Madison Square Garden -- a success rooted in the color of their skin and the outrageous caricatures they were forced to assume. Their mother spent 28 years trying to get them back. Truevine...

Her bright eyes and jolly face gaze upon us from the covers of old cookbooks, syrup bottles, salt and pepper shakers, and cookie jars. She is a prominent figure in literature, movies and folk art. She is Mammy. But who is Mammy, and where did she come from? And why is she nearly always represented as a large, dark woman with a sonorous and soothing voice, raucous laugh, infinite patience, self-deprecating wit, and implicit understanding and acceptance...

"In this compelling story about one of the nineteenth century's most famous Americans, Benjamin Reiss uses P.T. Barnum's Joice Heth hoax to examine the contours of race relations in the antebellum North. Barnum's first exhibit as a showman, Heth was an elderly enslaved woman who was said to be the 161-year-old former nurse of the infant George Washington. Seizing upon the novelty, the newly emerging commercial press turned her act - and especially...