Slavery is a tragic chapter in the history of Wilkes County with a lasting legacy. Prominent businessmen and celebrated civic leaders, like General William Lenoir and William Pitt Waugh, were among the county's largest slaveholders. Judith Williams Barber endured forty-five years of slavery and garnered respect from both white and black residents. Her story is linked to free person of color and noted landowner Henderson Waugh, whose illustrious, slaveholding...

In the mid-nineteenth century, U.S. slavery was characterized by relentless expansion and unrelenting exportation, not only of commodities but also of ideas. Zach Sell traces U.S. slavery's significance to colonial land-based dispossessions on a global scale, showing how slavery molded the United States as an empire-state while other imperial powers looked to it as a model for their own colonial projects. The narrative follows British factory owners...

Extrait: "Le livre de M. Saisset (que l'auteur me pardonne de commencer par une critique) a le défaut de porter un titre trop général; on ne voit pas assez quel est le sujet. Philosophie religieuse est un nom vague qui se prête aux designations les plus diverses; d'ordinaire il indique quelque nouvelle tentative pour concilier la philosophie et le christianisme, la raison et la foi..."

Once a sleepy plantation society, the region from the Chesapeake Bay to coastal North Carolina modernized and diversified its economy in the years before the Civil War. Central to this industrializing process was slave labor. “Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom” tells the story of how slaves seized opportunities in these conditions to protect their family members from the auction block. Calvin Schermerhorn argues that the African American...

Frederick Douglass was born in slavery as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey near Easton in Talbot County, Maryland. He was not sure of the exact year of his birth, but he knew that it was 1817 or 1818. As a young boy he was sent to Baltimore, to be a house servant, where he learned to read and write, with the assistance of his master's wife. In 1838 he escaped from slavery and went to New York City, where he married Anna Murray, a free colored...

The history of African Americans is a long, grim history full of injustices and brutality. But it is also filled with courage and perseverance. Gathered here in this omnibus edition are ten books that exemplify courage and a willingness to fight against all odds and at any cost for what is right. These books shed light on a proud people who have been mistreated for hundreds of years, a people who have refused to give up, and who continue to demand...

This is the second entry in our important African American Heritage series. The history of African Americans is a long, grim history full of injustices and brutality. But it is also filled with courage and perseverance. Gathered here in this omnibus edition are ten books that exemplify courage and a willingness to fight against all odds and at any cost for what is right. These books shed light on a proud people who have been mistreated for hundreds...

A town at the center of the United States becomes the site of an ongoing struggle for freedom and equality. In May, 1854, Massachusetts was in an uproar. A judge, bound by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, had just ordered a young African American man who had escaped from slavery in Virginia and settled in Boston to be returned to bondage in the South. An estimated fifty thousand citizens rioted in protest. Observing the scene was Amos Adams Lawrence,...

Set during the final days of slavery in 19th century Jamaica, following the trials, tribulations and survival of July and her odious mistress Caroline on a sugar plantation.