black slavery studies

Softcover. NY, The New Press, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 403 pages. Edited by Ira Berlin, the Bancroft Prize-winning author of Many Thousands Gone, and Leslie Harris, Slavery in New York brings together twelve new contributions by leading historians of slavery and African American life in New York. Published to accompany a major exhibit at the New York Historical Society, the book demonstrates how slavery shaped the day-to-day experience of New Yorkers, black and white, and how, as a way of doing business, it propelled New York to become the commercial and financial power it is today. Powerfully illustrated with images from the New York Historical Society exhibit, Slavery and the Making of New York will be the definitive account of New York's slave past.

Softcover. UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st pbk, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 352 pages, b&w illustrations. Wilma Dunaway breaks new ground by focusing on slave experiences on small plantations in the Upper South. She argues that a region was not buffered from the political, economic, and social impacts of enslavement simply because it was characterized by low black population density and small slaveholdings. By drawing on a massive statistical data base derived from antebellum census manuscripts and county tax records of 215 counties in nine states, on a vast array of slaveholder manuscripts, and on regional slave narratives, she pinpoints several indicators that distinguished Mountain South enslavement from the Lower South. These include a higher incidence of ethnic mixing between African and Native American slaves, heavier reliance on the field labor of women and children, and more frequent assignment of slaves to non-agricultural occupations. Dunaway also calls into question the notion that large numbers were necessary before slaves could engage in community building and resistance. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, reprint, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 576 pages. Clean copy

Hardcover. New York, John S. Taylor, 2nd pr., 1837, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, leather bound with gilt design on front and rear covers, spine also with gilt design with the title Cabinet of Freedom (the series under which the publisher issued this narrative). 517 pages with an extra illustrated title page dated 1836, the regular title page dated 1837. All edges gilt. First published by John Shugert in Lewistown PA a year earlier. Written with the help of Isaac Fisher, a white Philadelphia lawyer, who declares in his preface that he has edited the oral narrative Ball had dictated to him to omit any beliefs or feelings Ball may have expressed about slavery. This declaration of significant editing has led scholars to debate the authenticity of Ball's narrative, but most agree that it represents a true story. Ball describes his experiences as a slave, including the uncertainty of slave life and the ways in which the slaves are forced to suffer harsh and inhumane conditions. In particular, he recounts the qualities of his various masters, and the ways in which his fortune depended on their temperament. The leather has separated from the spine of the book but appears to be very repairable. The first 3 pages loose (a blank leaf and the two title pages), there is a light stain to the illustrated one and light foxing. The interior of the book is clean, tight with minimal foxing throughout.

Hardcover. Westport CT, Greenwood Press, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, glazed pictorial boards, 177 pages. Postma draws on primary sources and current historical scholarship to offer secondary readers and researchers a comprehensive and well-written history. He covers the entire Atlantic slave trade era, from the 1400s to the final abolition of chattel slavery in the New World in 1888. The focus is on Africa and the entire New World. While he describes the many horrors of the Middle Passage, he also examines how the slave trade contributed to the development of the modern international economy. The last chapters discuss the efforts to abolish the slave trade and its legacy. Throughout, Postma documents the sources that support his discussion and conclusions. Chapter notes are supplemented by an extensive annotated bibliography that includes books, articles, films, and electronic resources. The volume concludes with biographical sketches of important people and excerpts from primary documents written by enslaved Africans and white officials. The black-and-white reproductions of period illustrations add little to the text. Clean copy.

Softcover. Madison WI, University of Wisconsin, reprint., 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wraps, 244 pages. The Blind African Slave recounts the life of Jeffrey Brace (ne Boyrereau Brinch), who was born in West Africa around 1742. Captured by slave traders at the age of sixteen, Brace was transported to Barbados, where he experienced the shock and trauma of slave-breaking and was sold to a New England ship captain. After fighting as an enslaved sailor for two years in the Seven Years War, Brace was taken to New Haven, Connecticut, and sold into slavery. After several years in New England, Brace enlisted in the Continental Army in hopes of winning his manumission. After five years of military service, he was honorably discharged and was freed from slavery. As a free man, he chose in 1784 to move to Vermont, the first state to make slavery illegal. There, he met and married an African woman, bought a farm, and raised a family. Although literate, he was blind when he decided to publish his life story, which he narrated to a white antislavery lawyer, Benjamin Prentiss, who published it in 1810. Upon his death in 1827, Brace was a well-respected abolitionist. In this first new edition since 1810, Kari J. Winter provides a historical introduction, annotations, and original documents that verify and supplement our knowledge of Brace's life and times. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Washington DC, Counterpoint, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 642 pages. Hailed in 1849 as "a new department in the literature of civilization," the slave narrative forms the foundation of the African American literary tradition. From the late-eighteenth-century narratives by Africans who endured the harrowing Middle Passage, through the classic American fugitive slave narratives of the mid-nineteenth century, slave narratives have provided some of the most graphic and damning documentary evidence of the horrors of slavery. Riveting, passionate, and politically charged, the slave narrative blends personal memory and rhetorical attacks on slavery to create powerful literature and propaganda.The Civitas Anthology presents the seven classic antislavery narratives of the antebellum period in their entirety: The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave , the first slave narrative published by a woman in the Americas; The Confessions of Nat Turner , written when Turner was asked to record his motivation for leading the bloodiest slave revolt in U.S. history; The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass , an international bestseller and the first narrative to fashion the male fugitive slave into an African American cultural hero; The Narrative of William W. Brown , an account that explored with unprecedented realism the slave's survival ethic and the art of the slave trickster; The Narrative of the Life of Henry Bibb , the story of the struggles of the most memorable family man among the classic slave narrators; Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom , a gripping chronicle of one of the most daring and celebrated slave escapes ever recorded; and Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl , a dramatic text that exposed the sexual abuse of female slaves and pioneered the image of the fugitive slave woman as an articulate resister and survivor.Born out of lives of unparalleled suffering, the slave narrative captures all the bravery, drama, and hope that characterized the African American struggle against slavery. From these beginnings came some of the most influential novels in American literature, for the works of writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and Toni Morrison owe much of their power and social resonance to the slave narrative tradition. The Civitas Anthology gathers the most important narratives in this tradition into one volume for the first time, an indispensable resource for scholars, students, and general readers. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, reprint, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, b&w illustrations, 416 pages. Presents Black history in America as a force of strong resistance to racism and slavery rather than accommodation and discusses the people and events of this struggle. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 4th pr., 2000, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 670 pages, b&w illustrations. Written by the most prominent of the new generation of historians, this superb volume offers the most up-to-date and authoritative account available of African-American history, ranging from the first Africans brought as slaves into the Americas, to today's black filmmakers and politicians. Here is a panoramic view of African American life, rich in gripping first-person accounts and short character sketches that invite readers to relive history as African Americans experienced it. We begin in Africa, with the growth of the slave trade, and follow the forced migration of what is estimated to be between ten and twenty million people, witnessing the terrible human cost of slavery in the colonies of England and Spain. We read of the Haitian Revolution, which ended victoriously in 1804 with the birth of the first independent black nation in the New World, and of slave rebellions and resistance in the United States in the years leading up to the Civil War. There are vivid accounts of the Civil War and Reconstruction years, the backlash of notorious "Jim Crow" laws and mob lynchings, and the founding of key black educational institutions. The contributors also trace the migration of blacks to the major cities, the birth of the Harlem Renaissance, the hardships of the Great Depression and the service of African Americans in World War II, the struggle for Civil Rights in the 1950s and '60s, and the emergence of today's black middle class. From Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King, Jr., and Louis Farrakhan, To Make Our World Anew is an unforgettable portrait of a people. Clean copy.

Softcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 385 pages, b&w illustrations. Two epochal developments profoundly influenced the history of the Atlantic world between 1770 and 1870-the rise of women's rights activism and the drive to eliminate chattel slavery. The contributors to this volume, eminent scholars from a variety of disciplines, investigate the intertwining histories of abolitionism and feminism on both sides of the Atlantic during this dynamic century of change. They illuminate the many ways that the two movements developed together and influenced one another. Approaching a wide range of transnational topics, the authors ask how conceptions of slavery and gendered society differed in the United States, France, Germany, and Britain; how women's activism reached across national boundaries; how racial identities affected the boundaries of women's activism; and what was distinctive about African-American women's participation as activists. Their thought-provoking answers provide rich insights into the history of struggles for social justice across the Atlantic world. Sine faded. Clean copy.