Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South. Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and for its presentation of Tom, "a man of humanity," as the first black hero in American fiction. Labeled racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, it remains a shocking,...

Twelve Years a Slave (1853) is considered to be one of the most riveting and important documents recounting slavery in the United States. It is the heart-rending memoir of a free black man who is taken hostage and sold into slavery in a Louisiana plantation, his twelve years of bondage, and his remarkable escape to freedom. Since its publication, this classic has become a historical reference for its salient of depiction of life as a slave in the...

Historian Edward Baptist reveals how the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States.

Washington Black is an eleven-year-old field slave who knows no other life than the Barbados sugar plantation where he was born. When his master's eccentric brother chooses him to be his manservant, Wash is terrified of the cruelties he is certain await him. But Christopher Wilde, or "Titch," is a naturalist, explorer, scientist, inventor, and abolitionist. He initiates Wash into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky; where...

The moving abolitionist novel that fueled the fire of the human rights debate in 1852 and melodramatically condemned the institution of slavery through such powerfully realized characters as Tom, Eliza, Topsy, Eva, and Simon Legree.

"Stymied by her unfinished family tree assignment for school, a young girl seeks Grandma's counsel and learns about her ancestors, the consequences of slavery, and the history of Black resistance in the United States."--

"From the author of The Water Dancers and Good Family comes the story of an Irish family that emigrates to America in 1819 and settles in Cincinnati, Ohio, where they will confront the horrible reality of slavery on the opposite bank of the Ohio River"-- 1819. Cheated out of their family estate in Northern Ireland after the Napoleonic Wars, the Givens family settle in Cincinnati. After losing their mother in childbirth and their father to a riverboat...

"The epic rendering of a Black woman's journey through slavery and liberation, set in 17th-century colonial Brazil. "Palmares" recounts the journey of Almeyda, a Black slave girl who comes of age on Portuguese plantations and escapes to a fugitive slave settlement called Palmares. Following its destruction, Almeyda embarks on a journey across colonial Brazil to find her husband lost in battle. Her story brings to life a world impacted by greed, conquest,...

"Following one family through nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement, this powerful account illustrates how the Catholic Church relied on slave labor and slave sales to help finance its expansion, bringing to light the people whose forced labor helped to build the largest denomination in the nation"--

"Recalling the last hundred-plus years of her triumphant and tumultuous life, the narrator shares how her midwifery skills allowed her to sometimes transcend the racial and class barriers of her enslavement and how she never lost her sense of self."--