The most mature examination ever made of the role of slavery in a university's past.--John Samuel Harpham, Times Literary Supplement

Award-winning historian David W. Blight, with the Yale and Slavery Research Project, answers the call to investigate Yale University's historical involvement with slavery, the slave trade, and abolition. This narrative history demonstrates the importance of slavery in the making of this renowned American institution of higher learning.

Drawing on wide-ranging archival materials, Yale and Slavery extends from the century before the college's founding in 1701 to the dedication of its Civil War memorial in 1915, while engaging with the legacies and remembrance of this complex story. The book brings into focus the enslaved and free Black people who have been part of Yale's history from the beginning--but too often ignored in official accounts. These individuals and their descendants worked at Yale; petitioned and fought for freedom and dignity; built churches, schools, and antislavery organizations; and were among the first Black students to transform the university from the inside.

Always alive to the surprises and ironies of the past, Yale and Slavery presents a richer and more complete history of Yale, the third-oldest college in the country, showing how pillars of American higher education, even in New England, emerged over time intertwined with the national and international history of racial slavery.

2023 Reprint from the 1852 Edition. The preeminent American slave narrative first published in 1845, Frederick Douglass's Narrative powerfully details the life of the abolitionist from his birth into slavery in 1818 to his escape to the North in 1838, how he endured the daily physical and spiritual brutalities of his owners and driver, how he learned to read and write, and how he grew into a man who could only live free or die. This is an autobiographical account of the childhood and youth spent in slavery by a man who became a great abolitionist and leader of anti-slavery activity. Upon its publication in 1845, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, became an immediate best-seller. In addition to its far-reaching impact on the antislavery movement in the United States and abroad, Douglass's fugitive slave narrative earned it a place among the classics of nineteenth-century American autobiography.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS, an outspoken abolitionist, was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818 and, after his escape in 1838, repeatedly risked his own freedom as a prominent anti-slavery lecturer, writer, and publisher. After the Civil War he continued to work as a social reformer, supported women's suffrage, and held several public offices. He died in 1895.

This is an Introduction, History, and Photocopy of the Slave Bible. - There was an uneasy tension as the slave owners sought to maintain control and keep the slaves working calmly and the abolitionists began to question the moral cost of slavery. The abolitionist movement was growing and for the first time, the souls of the slaves were being considered. As they prepared to compile a special Bible for slaves in the West Indies, the missionaries agreed to uplift the Africans without teaching them anything that could incite rebellion. Throughout history, the Bible has encouraged us to fight against our enslavement to sin, Hell, death, and the grave. But it has also encouraged us to fight against our fellow man who might choose to take our freedom and use us for his own purpose. Just as Egypt enslaved the Jews and used them for labor to build their empire, so were the slaves of Africa used to build the empire of the British West Indies and the United States. Just as Moses stood against the Egyptians and led the children of Israel out of slavery and bondage, so are we encouraged to stand up against the cruel bonds of slavery and fight for our freedom and the freedom of fellow man. The clarion call for human freedom is found in many forms and in various stories throughout the Bible, but all of these ideals were stripped from and carved out of the Slave Bible. The Slave Bible, also called The Negro Bible, is one of the most powerful examples ever witnessed of manipulation using a controlled narrative. The Christian faith, a religion one-third of the world relied on to bring comfort, spiritual rest, peace, and salvation was the narrative being controlled, making the Slave Bible the ultimate propaganda tool and the greatest lie ever told.

This is an Introduction, History, and Photocopy of the Slave Bible. - There was an uneasy tension as the slave owners sought to maintain control and keep the slaves working calmly and the abolitionists began to question the moral cost of slavery. The abolitionist movement was growing and for the first time, the souls of the slaves were being considered. As they prepared to compile a special Bible for slaves in the West Indies, the missionaries agreed to uplift the Africans without teaching them anything that could incite rebellion. Throughout history, the Bible has encouraged us to fight against our enslavement to sin, Hell, death, and the grave. But it has also encouraged us to fight against our fellow man who might choose to take our freedom and use us for his own purpose. Just as Egypt enslaved the Jews and used them for labor to build their empire, so were the slaves of Africa used to build the empire of the British West Indies and the United States. Just as Moses stood against the Egyptians and led the children of Israel out of slavery and bondage, so are we encouraged to stand up against the cruel bonds of slavery and fight for our freedom and the freedom of fellow man. The clarion call for human freedom is found in many forms and in various stories throughout the Bible, but all of these ideals were stripped from and carved out of the Slave Bible. The Slave Bible, also called The Negro Bible, is one of the most powerful examples ever witnessed of manipulation using a controlled narrative. The Christian faith, a religion one-third of the world relied on to bring comfort, spiritual rest, peace, and salvation was the narrative being controlled, making the Slave Bible the ultimate propaganda tool and the greatest lie ever told.

Explores the legacies of slavery in Southern cities along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts

Cities are fraught sites in the national imagination, turned into identity markers when urban and rural indicate tastes rather than places. Cities bring chaos, draining the lifeblood of the nation like a tick draws blood from its host, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson's anti-urban polemics, which might have been written during any election year--centuries or months ago. Racism and anti-urbanism were born conjoined during the Revolution. Like their Atlantic coastal counterparts in the US North, Southern cities --similarly polyglot and cosmopolitan--resist the dominant, mutually inclusive prejudices of the nation that fails to contain them on its eroding, flooding coasts.

Captive City explores the paths of slavery in coastal cities, arguing that captivity haunts the hospitality cultures of Charleston, New Orleans, Savannah, and Baltimore. It is not a history of urban slavery, but a literary reflection that argues for coastal cities as a distinct region that scrambles time, resisting the post in postindustrial and the neo in neoliberalism. Jennie Lightweis-Goff offers a cultural exploration bound by American literature, especially life-writing by the enslaved, as well as compelling reassessments of works by canonical writers such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Hector St. John de Crevecoeur.

Lightweis-Goff reveals how the preserved yet fragile landscapes of these cities are haunted--not simply by the ghost tours that are signature stops for travelers in their historic districts--but by the echoes of slavery in their economies and built environments.

Davis begins with the dramatic Amistad case, which vividly highlights the international character of the Atlantic slave trade and the roles of the American judiciary, the presidency, the media, and of both black and white abolitionists. The heart of the book looks at slavery in the American South, describing black slaveholding planters, the rise of the Cotton Kingdom, the daily life of ordinary slaves, the highly destructive internal, long-distance slave trade, the sexual exploitation of slaves, the emergence of an African-American culture, and much more. But though centered on the United States, the book offers a global perspective spanning four continents. It is the only study of American slavery that reaches back to ancient foundations (discussing the classical and biblical justifications for chattel bondage) and also traces the long evolution of anti-black racism (as in the writings of David Hume and Immanuel Kant, among many others). Equally important, it combines the subjects of slavery and abolitionism as very few books do, and it illuminates the meaning of nineteenth-century slave conspiracies and revolts, with a detailed comparison with 3 major revolts in the British Caribbean. It connects the actual life of slaves with the crucial place of slavery in American politics and stresses that slavery was integral to America's success as a nation--not a marginal enterprise.

A definitive history by a writer deeply immersed in the subject, Inhuman Bondage offers a compelling narrative that links together the profits of slavery, the pain of the enslaved, and the legacy of racism. It is the ultimate portrait of the dark side of the American dream. Yet it offers an inspiring example as well--the story of how abolitionists, barely a fringe group in the 1770s, successfully fought, in the space of a hundred years, to defeat one of human history's greatest evils.

Winner of the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, American Sociological Association
Co-Winner of the Ralph J. Bunche Award, American Political Science Association

In a work of prodigious scholarship and enormous breadth, which draws on the tribal, ancient, premodern, and modern worlds, Orlando Patterson discusses the internal dynamics of slavery in sixty-six societies over time. These include Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, China, Korea, the Islamic kingdoms, Africa, the Caribbean islands, and the American South.

Praise for the previous edition:

Densely packed, closely argued, and highly controversial in its dissent from much of the scholarly conventional wisdom about the function and structure of slavery worldwide.
--Boston Globe

There can be no doubt that this rich and learned book will reinvigorate debates that have tended to become too empirical and specialized. Patterson has helped to set out the direction for the next decades of interdisciplinary scholarship.
--David Brion Davis, New York Review of Books

This is clearly a major and important work, one which will be widely discussed, cited, and used. I anticipate that it will be considered among the landmarks in the study of slavery, and will be read by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists--as well as many other scholars and students.
--Stanley Engerman

First published in 1892, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass Written By Himself is the final autobiography written by Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), a man who was born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland. Securing his self-liberation at twenty years of age in 1838, he went on to become the most renowned antislavery activist, social justice campaigner, author, orator, philosopher, essayist, historian, intellectual, statesman, and liberator in U.S. history. A powerful literary work, Douglass' final autobiography shares the stories of his 'several lives in one.'

Beginning with his war against 'the hell-black system of human bondage, ' Douglass bears witness to his personal experiences of mind-body-and soul-destroying tragedies. Living a new life as a 'fugitive from slavery, ' he tells his audiences of his decades-long labours as a world-leading freedom-fighter. Ever vigilant in his protest against the discriminatory persecutions endured by millions of 'my people, ' he testifies to the terrible reality that his 'life of comparative freedom' necessitated a lifelong fight against the inhumane injustices of 'American prejudice against colour.' Living a death-defying 'life of conflict and battle' during the Civil War, Douglass celebrates the 'life of victory' promised by post-war civil rights legislation only to condemn the failures of the U.S. nation either to exterminate slavery or secure equal rights for all. All too painfully aware that the 'conflict between the spirit of liberty and the spirit of slavery' was far from over and would become the unending struggle for 'aftercoming generations' in the ongoing war against white supremacy, Douglass remained a fearless fighter against the 'infernal and barbarous spirit of slavery' 'wherever I find it' to the day that he died.

This new edition examines Douglass' memorialization of his own and his mother Harriet Bailey's first-hand experiences of enslavement and of their 'mental' liberation through a 'love of letters'; his representation of Civil War Black combat heroism; his conviction that 'education means emancipation'; and finally, his 'unending battle' with white publishers for the freedom to 'tell my story.' This volume reproduces Frederick Douglass' emotionally powerful and politically hard-hitting anti-lynching speech, Lessons of the Hour, published in 1894.

ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

In DRAUSIN and JOSEPHINE: We Too Shall Pass, Drauzin Valsin Bacas and his brothers discover their father's secret of passing as white in New Orleans. Despite their pleas, their father chooses to maintain his white identity, leading to their banishment. Set against the backdrop of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Drauzin and his wife Josephine embark on a journey north with their children to escape racial oppression.

In Cincinnati, they decide to pass as white to secure their freedom. However, as they navigate the challenges of living as white Americans, they confront the legacy of their family's past. Drauzin grapples with his parents' actions, questioning the impact of their choices on their lives.

As Drauzin faces his mortality, he reflects on the consequences of passing and the true cost of denying their heritage. Josephine offers a perspective on their legacy, suggesting that their sacrifice may enable future generations to adapt and thrive.

DRAUSIN and JOSEPHINE: We Too Shall Pass is a poignant exploration of identity, sacrifice, and the enduring legacy of family.

Keith M. Finley's From Slavery to Segregation explores the key features shaping southern politics during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as explained in the South's defense of its racial systems. It treats slavery and segregation as part of the same whole rather than as discrete institutions rooted in different periods. In the process, the book uncovers the deep historical origins of the region's states' rights philosophy and the unfortunate persistence of a culture dominated by calls for white supremacy. While highlighting the broad overview of southern racial and political thought, Finley underscores the larger American struggle with racial injustice, which, although most pronounced in the South, afflicted the entire nation.

The South's defense of chattel slavery became a natural model for the region's defense of segregation during the Jim Crow era. Through a comparative analysis of the rhetoric employed in the justification of both racial institutions, Finley reveals elements of continuity and change in the region's identity. Ultimately, he shows how the history of the twentieth-century South is irreparably linked to the century before it. For instance, one cannot understand the ferocity of resistance to the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board decision without being aware of how and why the South emerged as it did after the Civil War.

The Old South and the New South shared a similar constellation of ideas that informed arguments advancing their respective race-based social orders, which took the form of a commonality of perception regarding race, a sense of being assailed by outsiders, and a series of appeals to the highest secular authority in the pantheon of regional and American beliefs--the Constitution. Discontinuity, however, marked the long-term strategies of both the prewar and postwar South. Although segregationists sought to preserve the racial status quo as did their forebears, they ultimately relented when confronted with federal power and grudgingly shifted toward a narrative that less often foregrounded race when championing states' rights.

How can a Black man and white woman, linked by ancestries in enslavement, use their uniquely different pasts to create space for a common reparative path toward the future?

In 2019, Sarah Eisner contacted Randy Quarterman, the great-great-great-grandson of a man her great-great-great-grandfather had enslaved. Building a friendship allowed them to rediscover their family histories and reckon with their own life paths, which diverged and dovetailed to ultimately lead them back to Savannah, Georgia.

Together, they worked to preserve a plot of land deeded from Keller to Quarterman in 1890, which was still held by the Quarterman family but in danger of being taken by eminent domain. The two created The Quarterman & Keller Foundation and The Reparations Project with the goals of supporting Black education, Black land preservation, and Black art. A story of a challenging, close, and mutually healing friendship, this book is ideal reading for students of Black Studies, History, Civil Rights, Cultural Anthropology, Sociology, History, and Politics.

Cannibals All! got more attention in William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator than any other book in the history of that abolitionist journal. And Lincoln is said to have been more angered by George Fitzhugh than by any other pro-slavery writer, yet he unconsciously paraphrased Cannibals All! in his House Divided speech.

Fitzhugh was provocative because of his stinging attack on free society, laissez-faire economy, and wage slavery, along with their philosophical underpinnings. He used socialist doctrine to defend slavery and drew upon the same evidence Marx used in his indictment of capitalism. Socialism, he held, was only the new fashionable name for slavery, though slavery was far more humane and responsible, the best and most common form of socialism.

His most effective testimony was furnished by the abolitionists themselves. He combed the diatribes of their friends, the reformers, transcendentalists, and utopians, against the social evils of the North. Why all this, he asked, except that free society is a failure?

The trouble all started, according to Fitzhugh, with John Locke, a presumptuous charlatan, and with the heresies of the Enlightenment. In the great Lockean consensus that makes up American thought from Benjamin Franklin to Franklin Roosevelt, Fitzhugh therefore stands out as a lone dissenter who makes the conventional polarities between Jefferson and Hamilton, or Hoover and Roosevelt, seem insignificant. Beside him Taylor, Randolph, and Calhoun blend inconspicuously into the American consensus, all being apostles of John Locke in some degree. An intellectual tradition that suffers from uniformity--even if it is virtuous, liberal conformity--could stand a bit of contrast, and George Fitzhugh can supply more of it than any other American thinker.

In 1829 David Walker, a free black born in Wilmington, North Carolina, wrote one of America's most provocative political documents of the nineteenth century, Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Decrying the savage and unchristian treatment blacks suffered in the United States, Walker challenged his afflicted and slumbering brethren to rise up and cast off their chains. Walker worked tirelessly to circulate his book via underground networks in the South, and he was so successful that Southern lawmakers responded with new laws cracking down on incendiary antislavery material. Although Walker died in 1830, the Appeal remained a rallying point for African Americans for many years to come, anticipating the radicalism of later black leaders, from Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, Jr.

In this new edition of the Appeal, the first in over thirty years, Peter P. Hinks, the leading authority on David Walker, provides a masterly introduction and extensive annotations that incorporate the most up-to-date research on Walker, much of it first reported by Hinks in his highly acclaimed biography, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren. Hinks also includes a unique appendix of documents showing the contemporary response--from North and South, black and white--to the Appeal itself and Walker's attempts to distribute it in the South. Historians and political activists have long recognized the importance of Walker's Appeal. At last we have an edition worthy of its persuasive immediacy and its enduring place in American history.

Decades after this celebrated work of narrative nonfiction won the National Book Award and changed the American conversation about race, Slaves in the Family is reissued by FSG Classics, with a new preface by the author.

The Ball family hails from South Carolina--Charleston and thereabouts. Their plantations were among the oldest and longest-standing plantations in the South. Between 1698 and 1865, close to four thousand black people were born into slavery under the Balls or were bought by them.

In Slaves in the Family, Edward Ball recounts his efforts to track down and meet the descendants of his family's slaves. Part historical narrative, part oral history, part personal story of investigation and catharsis, Slaves in the Family is, in the words of Pat Conroy, a work of breathtaking generosity and courage, a magnificent study of the complexity and strangeness and beauty of the word 'family.'

Slave narratives, some of the most powerful records of our past, are extremely rare, with only fifty-five post-Civil War narratives surviving. A mere handful are first-person accounts by slaves who ran away and freed themselves. Now two newly uncovered narratives, and the biographies of the men who wrote them, join that exclusive group with the publication of A Slave No More, a major new addition to the canon of American history. Handed down through family and friends, these narratives tell gripping stories of escape: Through a combination of intelligence, daring, and sheer luck, the men reached the protection of the occupying Union troops. David W. Blight magnifies the drama and significance by prefacing the narratives with each man's life history. Using a wealth of genealogical information, Blight has reconstructed their childhoods as sons of white slaveholders, their service as cooks and camp hands during the Civil War, and their climb to black working-class stability in the north, where they reunited their families.

The forgotten stories of America maroons--wilderness settlers evading discovery after escaping slavery

Over more than two centuries men, women, and children escaped from slavery to make the Southern wilderness their home. They hid in the mountains of Virginia and the low swamps of South Carolina; they stayed in the neighborhood or paddled their way to secluded places; they buried themselves underground or built comfortable settlements. Known as maroons, they lived on their own or set up communities in swamps or other areas where they were not likely to be discovered.

Although well-known, feared, celebrated or demonized at the time, the maroons whose stories are the subject of this book have been forgotten, overlooked by academic research that has focused on the Caribbean and Latin America. Who the American maroons were, what led them to choose this way of life over alternatives, what forms of marronage they created, what their individual and collective lives were like, how they organized themselves to survive, and how their particular story fits into the larger narrative of slave resistance are questions that this book seeks to answer. To survive, the American maroons reinvented themselves, defied slave society, enforced their own definition of freedom and dared create their own alternative to what the country had delineated as being black men and women's proper place. Audacious, self-confident, autonomous, sometimes self-sufficient, always self-governing; their very existence was a repudiation of the basic tenets of slavery.

When a slave named Uncle Tom is sold by his former masters, he is forced to leave his family behind. What follows is a story of love, faith, and tragedy. Throughout his struggles, Tom almost succumbs to hopelessness as his faith in God is tested by the hardships of slavery, while a belief in basic human morality guides Tom to make some of the most difficult choices imaginable.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19^th century and the second best-selling book of that century, following the Bible. It is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In the first year after it was published, 300,000 copies of the book were sold in the United States, and one million copies were sold in Great Britain. The novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the U.S. and is said to have helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War.

This case laminate collector's edition includes a Victorian inspired dust-jacket.

A ground-breaking, personal exploration of America's obsession with continuing human bondage from the editor of the New York Times-bestselling Barracoon.

Freedom and equality are the watchwords of American democracy. But like justice, freedom and equality are meaningless when there is no corresponding practical application of the ideals they represent. Physical, bodily liberty is fundamental to every American's personal sovereignty. And yet, millions of Americans--including author Deborah Plant's brother, whose life sentence at Angola Prison reveals a shocking current parallel to her academic work on the history of slavery in America--are deprived of these basic freedoms every day.

In her studies of Zora Neale Hurston, Deborah Plant became fascinated by Hurston's explanation for the atrocities of the international slave trade. In her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston wrote: But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw, was: my people had sold me and the white people had bought me. . . . It impressed upon me the universal nature of greed and glory. We look the other way when the basic human rights of marginalized and stigmatized groups are violated and desecrated, not realizing that only the practice of justice everywhere secures justice, for any of us, anywhere.

An active vigilance is required of those who would be and remain free; with Of Greed and Glory, Deborah Plant reveals the many ways in which slavery continues in America today and charts our collective course toward personal sovereignty for all.