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Searching for Jim is the untold story of Sam Clemens and the world of slavery that produced him. Despite Clemens's remarks to the contrary in his autobiography, slavery was very much a part of his life. Dempsey has uncovered a wealth of newspaper accounts and archival material revealing that Clemens's life, from the ages of twelve to seventeen, was intertwined with the lives of the slaves around him. During Sam's earliest years, his father, John Marshall Clemens, had significant interaction with...

Following the abolition of slavery in New England, white citizens seemed to forget that it had ever existed there. Drawing on a wide array of primary sources—from slaveowners' diaries to children's daybooks to racist broadsides—Joanne Pope Melish reveals not only how northern society changed but how its perceptions changed as well. Melish explores the origins of racial thinking and practices to show how ill-prepared the region was to accept a population of free people of color in its midst. Be...

This book contributes to the debate over the culpability of the Trans-Atlantic Slave from various disciplinary perspectives. The general thesis that undergirds the book is that by knowing who was predisposed to benefit the most from the trade and why, prompting them to initiate it, appropriate culpability can be assigned. This approach also allowed for a more in-depth analysis of the issue from many disciplines, making it the first of its kind. For the sake of cohesion and coherence, some of the...

Escaping Servitude: A Documentary History of Runaway Servants in Eighteenth-Century Virginia is an edited collection of runaway servant advertisements that appeared in newspapers in eighteenth-century Virginia. In addition to documenting the fugitive in the Chesapeake, it adds to our understanding of indentured servitude and provides valuable insights into an important chapter in American history. Escaping Servitude's contribution to scholarship is threefold. First, it calls new attention to t...

Bars Fight, a ballad telling the tale of an ambush by Native Americans on two families in 1746 in a Massachusetts meadow, is the oldest known work by an African-American author. Passed on orally until it was recorded in Josiah Gilbert Holland's History of Western Massachusetts in 1855, the ballad is a landmark in the history of literature that should be on every book lover's shelves.

The story of Equiano is arguably the best known slave narrative ever published. Originally published in 1789 as The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African, Written by Himself, this fascinating account is rewritten for young readers. The Amazing Adventures of Equiano traces the journey of a young African boy of the Ibo tribe, from his capture by Africans and then by whites when he was ten years old, his arduous but adventure-filled life as a slave, as...

Gender, family and sexual relations defined human slavery from its classical origins in Europe to the rise and fall of race-based slavery in the Americas. Gender, Mastery and Slavery is one of the first books to explore the importance of men and women to slaveholding across these eras. Foster argues that at the heart of the successive European institutions of slavery at home and in the New World was the volatile question of women's ability to exert mastery. Facing the challenge to play the 'goo...

From the seventeenth century into the nineteenth, thousands of Madagascar’s people were brought to American ports as slaves. In Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic, Wendy Wilson-Fall shows that the descendants of these Malagasy slaves in the United States maintained an ethnic identity in ways that those from the areas more commonly feeding the Atlantic slave trade did not. Generations later, hundreds, if not thousands, of African Americans maintain strong identities as Malag...

Examines the Northern opposition to the abolition of slavery in the 1830's, and the public disorders caused by this protest

This richly illustrated story of a typical slave ship and its last voyage from Denmark-Norway to Africa's Gold Coast to the Caribbean recreates, day-by-day, what life was like for captain, crew, and the newly enslaved; The sad and horrific triangular trade in human lives is made specific and personal through records and artefacts salvaged from the Fredensborg, the most meticulously documented slave vessel yet discovered; This is the story of a journey on the triangular trade between Denmark-Norw...

A detailed study of American political consciousness in the colonial period and early years of the republic, this suggests that proslavery thought originated in conservative New England and was brought to the South by clergymen, where it was embraced and developed into full-blown ideology.