"Captives and Voyagers breaks away from the conventional image of transatlantic migration and illustrates how black men and women, enslaved and free, came to populate the edges of an Anglo-Atlantic world. Whether as settlers in Sierra Leone or as slaves in Jamaica, these migrants brought a deep and affecting experience of being in motion to their new homelands. As they became firmly ensconced in the particulars of their new local circumstances, they...

A sobering account of a little-known crime against African Americans, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today. From the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II, under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these "debts," prisoners were sold...

The Civil War Revealed what united as well as what divided Americans in the nineteenth century--not only in its deadly military conflict, but also in the broader battle of ideas, dueling moral systems, and competing national visions that preceded and followed. This cultural civil war was the clash among. North, South, and West, as their leaders sought to shape Manifest Destiny and slavery politics. No site embodied this struggle more completely than...

New Yorker James Baldwin once declared that a black man can look at a map of the United States, contemplate the area south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and thus scare himself to death. In this book, the author a renowned literary scholar explores why black writers, whether born in Mississippi, New York, or elsewhere, have consistently both loved and hated the South. She explains that for these authors the South represents not so much a place or even a...

Shawn O'Brien rides to Texas to look for a friend's missing brother, sparking a battle with the greatest evil in the West.

A biography of the nineteenth-century author whose anti-slavery novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" helped intensify the disagreement between North and South.

"In the popular imagination, slavery in the United States ended with Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. The proclamation may have been limited--freeing only slaves within Confederate states who were able to make their way to Union lines--but it is nonetheless generally seen as the key moment, with Lincoln's leadership setting into motion a train of inevitable events that culminated in the passage of an outright ban: the Thirteenth Amendment....

"Based on the true story of Henry 'Box' Brown's amazing escape from slavery, a gripping tale about the lengths to which people will go in seeking freedom brings to light one of the heroes of the Underground Railroad." -- Provided by publisher.