African Americans played a larger than life role in the founding, military struggles, and the continuing formation and moral role of a unique democracy. They fought in every conflict, including the American Revolution. Those of African Heritage constitute a wealth of courage and sacrifice under fire and beyond the battle field. Scroll Down & CLICK on the UNDERLINED TITLE to read a preview on Amazon. Be amazed by history too long ignored!
Negro in the American Revolution
This 1961 classic work remains the most comprehensive history of the many and important roles played by African Americans during the American Revolution. With this book, Benjamin Quarles added a new dimension to the military history of the Revolution and addressed for the first time the diplomatic repercussions created by the British evacuation of African Americans at the close of the war. The compelling narrative brings the Revolution to life by portraying those tumultuous years as experienced by Americans at all levels of society.
African Americans in the Revolutionary War
In this fascinating and enlightening work, military historian Michael Lee Lanning reveals the little-known, critical, and heroic role African Americans played in the American Revolution, serving in integrated unitsa situation that wouldnt exist again until the Korean War, more than 150 years later. In the words of the author, “The daily life of black soldiers, sailors, and marines in the Revolution differed little from that of their white comrades. Though prejudice and discrimination did not evaporate with the first shots at Lexington, black servicemen in the Revolution certainly experienced a marked increase in equality throughout the war. Ultimately in war men are judged by their performance rather than by the color of their skin as they fought for their countrys liberty, their units pride, and their mutual survival.
The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution by William Nell
Published in 1855, this is the first and classic historical account of the African American important participation in the American Revolution. William Cooper Nell, a nineteenth century abolitionist, wished to reexamine our understanding of this famous war and highlight to the world the black soldiers who fought and died for the cause of American Independence. Nell exposed how in each state, from Massachusetts to Florida, African-Americans were active participants in the Revolution. Harriet Beecher Stowe, in the introduction to Nell’s work, perfectly expresses the value of services given by African-Americans. Nell’s work is a brilliant reassessment of history and wonderfully explains the contributions of African-Americans to the War of Independence.
We commonly think of the American Revolution as simply the war for independence from British colonial rule. But, of course, that independence actually applied to only a portion of the American population—African Americans would still be bound in slavery for nearly another century. Alan Gilbert asks us to rethink what we know about the Revolutionary War. Gilbert presents persuasive evidence that slavery could have been abolished during the Revolution itself if either side had fully pursued the military advantage of freeing slaves and pressing them into combat. Extensive research also reveals that free blacks on both sides played a crucial and underappreciated role in the actual fighting.
“A radical, well-informed, and highly original reinterpretation of the place of slavery in the American War of Independence.”-David Brion Davis, Yale University. This carefully documented, chilling history presents a different view of the profound role that slavery played in the founding of the republic, from the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution through the creation of the Constitution. The book begins with a novel explanation about the impact of the Somerset Case on the founding of the republic. To ensure the preservation of slavery, the southern colonies joined the northerners in their fight for “freedom” and their rebellion against England. In 1774, at the First Continental Congress John Adams promised southern leaders to support their right to maintain slavery. Thomas Jefferson relied on this understanding when carefully crafting the stirring words of the Declaration of Independence. As Eleanor Holmes Norton explains in her introduction, “The price of freedom from England was bondage for African slaves in America. America would be a slave nation.”
Black Americans in the Revolutionary Era
In this fresh look at liberty and freedom in the Revolutionary era from the perspective of black Americans, Woody Holton recounts the experiences of slaves who seized freedom by joining the British as well as those who served in patriot military forces. Holton examines the ways in which Revolutionary rhetoric about liberty provided African Americans with the language and inspiration for advancing their cause. He outlines how African Americans influenced the course of the Revolution and continued to be affected by its aftermath. Caught in a profound and tragic paradox of freedom and despite the American rhetoric of equality, most black Americans remained enslaved after the Revolution, including those who fought to ensure a new nation’s liberty.
Death or Liberty by Douglas Egerton
In Death or Liberty, Douglas R. Egerton offers a sweeping chronicle of African American history stretching from Britain’s 1763 victory in the Seven Years’ War to the election of slaveholder Thomas Jefferson as president in 1800. He recaptures the drama of slaves, freed blacks, and white reformers fighting for a young nation’s free identity. Although this struggle often unfolded in the corridors of power, Egerton pays special attention to what black Americans did for themselves. His narrative brims with compelling portraits of forgotten African American activists and rebels, who battled huge odds. Egerton concludes that despite the real possibility of peaceful, if gradual, emancipation, the Founders ultimately lacked the courage to end slavery. A tragedy that consumed the lives of so many future generations.
The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution
This carefully researched history details the military, political, economic, and cultural experience of black people during the era of the American Revolution. Beginning with Crispus Attucks, the first man killed in the Revolutionary action, the authors recount a series of fascinating personal histories. The text is highlighted by excerpts form letters, journals, newspaper articles, and other documents, as well as by poems, broadsides, and passages from magazines of the day. The book is a revised and expanded edition of the authors’ classic catalog that accompanied a pioneering exhibition mounted in 1973 by the National Portrait Gallery.
First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks
First Martyr of Liberty explores how Crispus Attucks’s death in the 1770 Boston Massacre led to his achieving mythic significance in African Americans’ struggle to incorporate their experiences and heroes into the mainstream of the American historical narrative. While the other victims of the Massacre have been largely ignored, Attucks is widely celebrated as the first to die in the cause of freedom during the era of the American Revolution. He became a symbolic embodiment of black patriotism and citizenship. This book traces Attucks’s career through both history and myth to understand how his public memory has been constructed. Since so little evidence exists about the man’s actual life, the focus is on how he has been remembered–variously as either a hero or a villain–and why at times he has been forgotten by different groups and individuals from the eighteenth century to the present day.
Here is a magnificent account of a past rich in beauty and creativity, but also in tragedy and trauma. Eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter blends a vivid narrative based on the latest research with a wonderful array of artwork by African American artists, works which add a new depth to our understanding of black history. Painter deeply enriches her narrative with a series of striking works of art–more than 150 in total, most in full color–works that profoundly engage with black history and that add a vital dimension to the story, a new form of witness that testifies to the passion and creativity of the African-American experience.
The African-American Soldier by Colin Powell
From Crispus Attucks and the African Americans who fought in Washington’s army to Colin Powell and Desert Strom, Lanning highlights the history of African American soldiers in the United States military. Countless African American men fought for America. And after the fight was won, often they returned to slavery, as in the American Revolution, or fought a continuing battle of segregation and bigotry in the heartland of America, as in World War I and II. Lanning describes the struggles of these brave men who had the courage to face terrible hardships on the battle field; many continuing the fight upon returning home.
Josiah Book 1 in the Shades of Liberty Series
In the spirit of Black Lives Matter and the new hit movie “Black Panther” comes a new & exciting action packed historical fiction series of African American soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War. It is September 15, 1776. The British army launches it invasion of Manhattan Island. Thousands of British and Hessian troops storm ashore at Kip’s Bay. Josiah and his two friends, run-away slaves who enlisted to tote a musket in Washington’s army, survive one of the war’s worst bombardments. Caught behind lines, they try to avoid capture while battling their way to Harlem Ridge where the Continental Army has dug in to face their enemy. Richly researched and historically accurate, from Washington to the lowly private, all are meticulously portrayed that fateful day in which a new nation’s survival was held in the balance. A desperate journey against insurmountable odds, join Josiah and friends as they fight, they suffer, and die striving for their rightful share of a new nation’s promise – a promise disguised in many Shades of Liberty.
Josiah’s Mettle Book 2 in the Shades of Liberty Series
Josiah finds himself embroiled in a desperate battle to save a third of Washington’s army trapped in New York City by the invading British forces. General Putnam’s Division, over 3,000 men including supplies and most of America’s cannon, were evacuating the city when the British struck at Kip’s Bay. Their only hope of escape is a mad dash through the tangled wilderness that hugs western Manhattan. In suffocating heat they must drag the cannon and haul supplies sixteen miles, all under the fear of attack. Washington plans a last-ditch attempt to delay the British surge across the island. He sends his best regiment along with the newly formed rangers; backwoodsmen and crack riflemen. Josiah and his fellow bondsmen unite with the rangers and form a wall of steel. They must hold back their enemy, offering their lives in exchange, allowing their comrades the precious time needed to escape the jaws of death. Josiah and fellow black patriots continue their fight for America’s freedom, believing in a new nation that claims all men are created equal, a claim disguised in many shades of liberty.
Forced Founders by Woody Holton
The Virginia gentry’s efforts to shape London’s imperial policy were thwarted by British merchants and by a coalition of Indian nations. In 1774, elite Virginians suspended trade with Britain in order to pressure Parliament and, at the same time, to save restive Virginia debtors from a terrible recession. The boycott and the growing imperial conflict led to rebellions by enslaved Virginians, Indians, and tobacco farmers. By the spring of 1776 the gentry believed the only way to regain control of the common people was to take Virginia out of the British Empire. Forced Founders uses the new social history to shed light on a classic political question: why did the owners of vast plantations, viewed by many of their contemporaries as aristocrats, start a revolution? As Holton’s fast-paced narrative unfolds, the old story of patriot versus loyalist becomes decidedly more complex.
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing
Though considered Youth books, these two novels are stunning, leaving a lasting impact on all ages. The firstnovel is set in the 1760s, in Boston, where Octavian lives with his mother Cassiopeia, a West African princess. Young Octavian is being raised by a group of rational philosophers known only by numbers — but it is only after he opens a forbidden door that learns the hideous nature of their experiments, and his own chilling role them. Set in Revolutionary Boston, M. T. Anderson’s mesmerizing novel takes place at a time when Patriots battled to win liberty while African slaves were entreated to risk their lives for a freedom they would never claim. The first of two parts, this deeply provocative novel reimagines past as an eerie place that has startling resonance for readers today. The hallmarks of Anderson’s style are a sharp ear for adolescent voices, a sometimes perverse sense of humor and an interest on the average human’s ability to behave ethically. His new book has all those qualities, but represents a striking advance in terms of both technique and literary ambition.
Fearing a death sentence, Octavian, in Book 2, escapes to find shelter in British-occupied Boston where he hopes to find safe harbor. Instead, he is soon to learn of Lord Dunmore’s proclamation offering freedom to slaves who join the counterrevolutionary forces. In Volume II of his unparalleled masterwork, M. T. Anderson recounts Octavian’s experiences as the Revolutionary War explodes around him, thrusting him into intense battles and tantalizing him with elusive visions of liberty. Ultimately, this astonishing narrative escalates to a startling, deeply satisfying climax, while reexamining our national origins in a singularly provocative light. “A novel of the first rank, it sweeps up history into a comprehensible and deeply textured pattern.” — The New York Times Book Review
American Patriots by Gail Buckley
A dramatic and moving tribute to the military’s unsung heroes, American Patriots tells the story of the black servicemen and women who defended American ideals on the battlefield, even as they faced racism in the ranks and segregation on the home front. From the American Revolution to Desert Storm, American Patriots chronicles the incredible sacrifice and bravery of black soldiers who not only confronted war and all its horrors, but a society hell bent on slavery and bigotry. Fourteen years in the making, American Patriots is a landmark chronicle of the intrepid men and women whose courage and determination changed the course of American history.
A startling and eye-opening look into America’s First Family, Never Caught is the powerful story about a daring woman of “extraordinary grit” (The Philadelphia Inquirer). “A crisp and compulsively readable feat of research and storytelling” (USA TODAY), historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar weaves a powerful tale and offers fascinating new scholarship on how one young woman risked everything to gain freedom from the famous founding father.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., gives us a sumptuously illustrated landmark book tracing African American history from the arrival of the conquistadors to the election of Barack Obama. Informed by the latest, sometimes provocative scholarship and including more than seven hundred images—ancient maps, fine art, documents, photographs, cartoons, posters—Life Upon These Shores focuses on defining events, debates, and controversies, as well as the signal achievements of people famous and obscure. Life Upon These Shores is a book of major importance, a breathtaking tour de force of the historical imagination.
American History in Black & White by David Barton
Setting the Record Straight is a unique view of the religious and moral heritage of black Americans, with an emphasis on the untold yet significant stories from our rich political history. The material presented is ground-breaking and revolutionary, leaving viewers amazed and inspired.
Children of Fire: A History of African Americans
Ordinary people don’t experience history as it is taught by historians. They live across the convenient chronological divides we impose on the past. The same people who lived through the Civil War and the eradication of slavery also dealt with the hardships of Reconstruction, so why do we almost always treat them separately? In this groundbreaking new book, renowned historian Thomas C. Holt challenges this form to tell the story of generations of African Americans through the lived experience of the subjects themselves, with all of the nuances, ironies, contradictions, and complexities one might expect.
History of the Negro Race in America
Slavery existed long before the United States of America was founded, but so did opposition to slavery. Both flourished after the founding of the country, and the anti-slavery movement was known as abolition. In 1800, George W. Williams published his history of African Americans from 1619-1800. This was one of the first comprehensive histories of Black Americans subtitled: Negroes as Slaves, As Soldiers, and as Citizens.” Mr. Williams was the first African American member of the Ohio Legislature and Judge Advocate for the state. Two volumes are combined into one in this edition.
Bloods Black Veterans of the Vietnam War
An oral history unlike any other, Bloods features twenty black men who tell the story of how members of their race were sent off to Vietnam in disproportionate numbers, and of the special test of patriotism they faced. Told in voices no reader will soon forget, Bloods is a must-read for anyone who wants to put the Vietnam experience in historical, cultural, and political perspective.
This powerful, intensely dramatic book is the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1794-1803, a revolution that began in the wake of the Bastille but became the model for the Third World liberation movements from Africa to Cuba. It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of master toward slave was commonplace and ingeniously refined. And it is the story of a barely literate slave named Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the black people of San Domingo in a successful struggle against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces and in the process helped form the first independent nation in the Caribbean.
The Slave Ship by Marcus Rediker
For three centuries slave ships carted millions of people from the coasts of Africa across the Atlantic to the Americas. In The Slave Ship, award-winning historian Marcus Rediker draws on thirty years of research in maritime archives to create an unprecedented history of these vessels and the human drama acted out on their rolling decks. He reconstructs in chilling detail the lives, deaths, and terrors of captains, sailors, and the enslaved aboard a floating dungeon trailed by sharks. This is a tale of tragedy and terror, but also an epic of resilience and survival; a profound and still haunting history of race, class, and modern economy.
Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution–the nation’s original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America’s later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. Told through intimate slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history.
The Invisibles African American Slaves in the White House
The Invisibles chronicles African American slaves inside the White House from its beginnings in 1782 until 1862. During these years, slaves were the only African Americans to whom the most powerful men in the United States were exposed on a daily, and familiar, basis. By reading about these often-intimate relationships, readers will better understand some of the views that various presidents held about class and race in American society, and how these slaves contributed not only to the life and comforts of the presidents they served, but to America as a whole.
From the era of slavery to the present day, Medical Apartheid is the first full history of black America’s shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting experimental subjects at the hands of the medical establishment. It reveals how blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Shocking new details about the government’s notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions. Medical Apartheid is a product of years of prodigious research into medical journals and experimental reports long undisturbed;a masterful book that will stir up both controversy and long-needed debate.
Samuel Fraunces, a “colored man of mixed race” had overcome racial prejudice with his geniality as a host, excellent wine cellar and exceptional cooking to become the wealthy owner of several restaurants and Fraunces Tavern, a popular resort in New York City frequented by Sons of Liberty men and officers of America’s Continental Army. Despite tremendous racism and prejudice, Samuel had excelled as an ordinary man who did extraordinary things; not in the heat of a moment, but under threat of death or being sold into slavery for years. Given a choice, he decided to aid the American cause, spying on his British hosts. As such, he deserves to be remembered as the hero he was.
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“Before the Mayflower” tells the history of “the other Americans,” how they came to America, and what happened to them when they got here. The book is comprehensive and detailed, providing little-known and often overlooked facts about the lives of black folks through slavery, Reconstruction, America’s wars, the Great Depression, and the civil rights movement. The book includes a useful time line and some fascinating archival images. It is a 2016 Reprint of 1962 Edition. The entire historical timeline of African Americans is addressed, from the Colonial period through the civil rights upheavals of the late 1950s to 1961, the time of publication. Bennett’s history is infused with a desire to set the record straight about black contributions to the Americas and about the powerful Africans of antiquity.
Winner: 2016 Nat. Book Award. Finalist: 2016 Nat. Book Critics Circle. Bestseller: New York Times & Washington Post. “An engrossing and relentless intellectual history of prejudice in America…. The greatest service Kendi [provides] is the ruthless prosecution of American ideas about race for their tensions, contradiction and unintended consequences.”-The Washington Post. “A deep (and often disturbing) chronicling of how anti-black thinking has entrenched itself in the fabric of American society.”-The Atlantic. “An intricate look at the history of race in the U.S.”-Time.
In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. About six million African-Americans abandoned the states of the Old Confederacy between 1915 and 1970. “If all of their dreams do not come true,” it confidently predicted, “enough will come to pass to justify their actions.” Prophetic words, Isabel Wilkerson won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing at The New York Times in 1994 and currently teaches journalism at Boston University. Arguments raged for decades about the tangled pathology of black families divided from their rural roots and thrown together in dead-end Northern slums. “The migrants were cast as poor illiterates,” Wilkerson wrote, “joblessness and welfare dependency wherever they went.” But recent scholarship, which Wilkerson embraces, tells another story. Today, these black migrants are viewed as a modern version of the Europeans who flooded America’s shores.
The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
First published in 1845, the “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” is the memoir of former slave turned abolitionist, Frederick Douglass. Considered as one of the most famous of all the slave narratives ever written, the story recounts Douglass’s life from early childhood growing up in Maryland as a slave to his eventual escape to the North. Douglass tells of his life with various owners depicting the cruelty that he himself endured and was witness to. The work of Frederick Douglass would be an early and inspirational voice in the abolitionist movement, one which would give hope to the cause and which would ultimately help to bring about an end to that brutally unjust chapter of American history known as slavery.
Ex-slave Frederick Douglass’s second autobiography-written after ten years of reflection following his legal emancipation in 1846 and his break with his mentor William Lloyd Garrison-catapulted Douglass into the international spotlight as the foremost spokesman for American blacks, both freed and slave. Written during his celebrated career as a speaker and newspaper editor, My Bondage and My Freedom reveals the author of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) grown more mature, forceful, analytical, and complex with a deepened commitment to the fight for equal rights and liberties.
If you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, which side would you want to win? When the last British governor of Virginia declared that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the king would be emancipated, tens of thousands of slaves fled from farms, plantations, and cities to try to reach the British camp. A military strategy originally designed to break the plantations of the American South had unleashed one of the great exoduses in U.S. history. With powerfully vivid storytelling, Schama details the odyssey of the escaped blacks through the fires of war and the terror of potential recapture, shedding light on an extraordinary, little-known chapter in the dark saga of American slavery.
Race and the Writing of History
Despite increased interest in recent years in the role of race in Western culture, scholars have neglected much of the body of work produced in the 19th and 20th centuries by black intellectuals. For example, while DuBois’ thoughts about Africa may be familiar to contemporary academics, those of his important precursors and contemporaries are not widely known. Similarly, although contemporary figures such as Martin Bernal, Molefi Assante, and other “Afrocentrists” are the subject of heated debate, such debates are rarely illuminated by an awareness of the traditions that preceded them. Race and The Writing of History redresses this imbalance, using Bernal’s Black Athena and its critics as an introduction to the historical inquiries of African-American intellectuals and many of their African counterparts. Keita examines the controversial legacy of writing history in America and offers a new perspective. As a result, this book sheds new light on how ideas about race and racism have shaped the stories we tell about ourselves.
The American Slave Coast tells the horrific story of how the slavery business in the United States made the reproductive labor of “breeding women” essential to the expansion of the nation. The book shows how slaves’ children, and their children’s children, were human savings accounts that were the basis of money and credit. This was so deeply embedded in the economy of a new nation that it could only be decommissioned by Emancipation, achieved through the bloodiest war in the history of the United States. The American Slave Coast is an alternative history of the United States that presents the slavery business, both north and south, our nation’s founders, as well as familiar historical figures and events, in a revealing new light.
Deliverance: Mary Fields by Miantae Metcalf McConnell
Mary Fields, a fifty-three-year old second-generation slave, emancipated and residing in Toledo, receives news of her friend’s impending death. Remedies packed in her satchel, Mary rushes to board the Northern Pacific. Days later, she arrives in the Montana wilderness to find Mother Mary Amadeus lying on frozen earth in a broken-down cabin. Certain that the cloister of frostbit Ursuline nuns and their students, Indian girls rescued from nearby reservations, will not survive without assistance, Mary decides to stay. She weathers wolf attacks, wagon crashes and treacherous conspiracies by scoundrels, local politicians and the state’s first Catholic bishop. Mary proves to manifest her personal vision of independence. Powerfully written with excellent characterization, the author knows her history and seamlessly has her characters live within it.
African Americans: A Concise History 3rd Edition
African Americans: A Concise History illuminates the central place of African-Americans in U.S. history by telling the story of what it has meant to be black in America and how African-American history is inseparably woven into the greater context of American history. It follows the long and turbulent journey of African-Americans, the rich culture they have nurtured throughout their history and the quest for freedom through which African-Americans have sought to counter oppression and racism.
Young Adult. Did you know that many of America’s Founding Fathers—who fought for liberty and justice for all—were slave owners? Through the powerful stories of five enslaved people who were “owned” by four of our greatest presidents, this book helps set the record straight about the role slavery played in the founding of America. From Billy Lee, valet to George Washington, to Alfred Jackson, faithful servant of Andrew Jackson, these dramatic narratives explore our country’s great tragedy—that a nation “conceived in liberty” was also born in shackles. These stories help us know the real people who were essential to the birth of this nation but traditionally have been left out of the history books. Their stories are true—and they should be heard. This thoroughly-researched and documented book can be worked into multiple aspects of the common core curriculum.
Breaking Ground Breaking Silence
How can we learn about the lives of African slaves in Colonial America? Often forbidden to read or write, they left few written records. But in 1991 scientists rediscovered New York’s long-ignored African Burial Ground, which opened an exciting new window into the past. A woman with filed teeth buried with a girdle of beads; a black soldier buried with his British Navy uniform, his face pointing east; a mother and child, laid to rest side by side: to scientists, each of these burials has much to tell us about African slaves in America. Breaking Ground, Breaking Silence shows how archaeologists and anthropologists have learned to read life stories in shattered bones, tiny beads, and the faint traces left by coffin lids in ancient soil. At the same time, by blending together the insights found buried in the soil and the results of historians’ careful studies, it gives us a moving, inspiring portrait of the lives Africans created in Colonial New York.
The Unchained: Slave Narratives
Vol. 1 of 2. This unique collection consists of 28 of the most influential narratives of former slaves and the stories of people who have helped them. With their powerful & unflinching stories, they changed people’s convictions and shook the very foundation of slavery. There are dozens of narratives including: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup, The Underground Railroad, The Willie Lynch Letter: The Making of Slave! , Confessions of Nat Turner, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs, Harriet:The Moses of Her People, History of Mary Prince, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom: by Louis Hughes, Narrative of the Life of J. D. Green: a Runaway Slave, Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington, Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, and many more.
Master George’s People: George Washington’s Slaves
As the first President of the United States of America and the Commander in Chief who led a rebel army to victory in the Revolutionary War, George Washington was a legendary leader of men. He had high expectations of his soldiers, employees, and associates. However the workers who kept Mount Vernon operating were enslaved. And although Washington called them “my people,” by law they were his property. The Founders birthed a document celebrating “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” as unalienable rights at the same time people were being bought and sold. In the pages of Master George’s People, Marfé Ferguson Delano gives us fascinating portraits of cooks, overseers, valets, farm hands, and more—essential people nearly lost in the shadows of the past—interwoven with an extraordinary examination of the conscience of the Father of Our Country.
Now is Your Time: The African-American Struggle for Freedom
Since they were first brought as captives to Virginia, the people who would become African Americans have struggled for freedom. Thousands fought for the rights of all Americans during the Revolutionary War, and for their own rights during the Civil War. On the battlefield, through education, and through their creative genius, they have worked toward one goal: that the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness be denied no one. Fired by the legacy of men and women like Abd al Rahman Ibrahima, Ida B. Wells, and George Latimer, the struggle continues today. Here is African-American history, told through the stories of the people whose experiences have shaped and continue to shape the America in which we live.
From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans
The Eight Edition has been thoroughly revised to include expanded material on Africa, the history of African Americans in the Caribbean and Latin America, the current situation of African Americans in the United States, popular culture, and much more. It has also been redesigned with new charts, maps, photographs, paintings, illustrations, and color inserts. Written by distinguished and award-winning authors, retaining the same features that have made it the most popular text on African American History ever, and with fresh and appealing new features, From Slavery to Freedom remains the leading text on the market.
The Underground Railroad: From Slavery to Freedom
First published in 1898, this comprehensive history was the first documented survey of a system that helped fugitive slaves escape from areas in the antebellum South to regions as far north as Canada. Comprising fifty years of research, the text includes interviews and excerpts from diaries, letters, biographies, memoirs, speeches, and a large number of other firsthand accounts. Together, they shed much light on the origins of a system that provided aid to runaway slaves, including the degree of formal organization within the movement, methods of procedure, geographical range, leadership roles, the effectiveness of Canadian settlements, and the attitudes of courts and communities toward former slaves. Invaluable for its unbiased, literate treatment, this carefully researched study will be an excellent resource for instructors and students of African-American history, and engrossing literature for readers interested in the plight of fugitive slaves in the pre-Civil War era.
An Imperfect God: George Washington & Slavery
When George Washington wrote his will, he made the startling decision to set his slaves free; earlier he had said that holding slaves was his “only unavoidable subject of regret.” In this groundbreaking work, Henry Wiencek explores the founding father’s engagement with slavery at every stage of his life–as a Virginia planter, soldier, politician, president and statesman. Wiencek’s revelatory narrative, based on a meticulous examination of private papers, court records, and the voluminous Washington archives, documents for the first time the moral transformation culminating in Washington’s determination to emancipate his slaves. He acted too late to keep the new republic from perpetuating slavery, but his repentance was genuine. And it was perhaps related to the possibility–as the oral history of Mount Vernon’s slave descendants has long asserted–that a slave named West Ford was the son of George and a woman named Venus; Wiencek has new evidence that this could indeed have been true.
From the late eighteenth century through the end of the Civil War, Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians bought, sold, and owned Africans and African Americans as slaves, a fact that persisted after the tribes’ removal from the Deep South to Indian Territory. The tribes formulated racial and gender ideologies that justified this practice and marginalized free black people in the Indian nations well after the Civil War and slavery had ended. Through the end of the nineteenth century, ongoing conflicts among Choctaw, Chickasaw, and U.S. lawmakers left untold numbers of former slaves and their descendants in the two Indian nations without citizenship in either the Indian nations or the United States. In this groundbreaking study, Barbara Krauthamer rewrites the history of southern slavery, emancipation, race, and citizenship to reveal the centrality of Native American slaveholders and the black people they enslaved.
Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage
The compelling account of how two heritages united in their struggle to gain freedom and equality in America—now updated with new content. The first paths to freedom taken by runaway slaves led to Native American villages. There, black men and women found acceptance and friendship among our country’s original inhabitants. Though they seldom appear in textbooks and movies, the children of Native- and African-American marriages helped shape the early days of the fur trade, added a new dimension to frontier diplomacy, and made a daring contribution to the fight for American liberty. Since its original publication, William Loren Katz’s Black Indians has remained the definitive work on a long, arduous quest for freedom and equality. This new edition features a new cover and includes updated information about a neglected chapter in American history.
Black Slave Holders: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina
Most Americans, both black and white, believe that slavery was a system maintained by whites to exploit blacks, but this authoritative study reveals the extent to which African Americans played a significant role as slave masters. Examining South Carolina’s diverse population of African-American slave owners, the book demonstrates that free African Americans widely embraced slavery as a viable economic system and that they–like their white counterparts–exploited the labor of slaves on their farms and in their businesses. Drawing on the federal census, wills, mortgage bills of sale, tax returns, and newspaper advertisements, the author reveals the nature of African-American slave holding, its complexity, and its rationales. He describes how some African-American slave masters had earned their freedom but how many others–primarily mulattoes born of free parents–were unfamiliar with slavery’s dehumanization.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Portions of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl first appeared serially in 1861 in the New York Tribune; however publication ceased before the completion of the narrative due to its being deemed as too shocking for the average newspaper reader of the day. Harriet Jacobs wrote under the pseudonym of Linda Brent because, as an escaped slave, having her identity revealed would have jeopardized her freedom under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. One of the first of the slave narratives, Jacobs’s work was a passionate appeal to white women living in the Northern United States to enlighten themselves as to the evils of slavery. Jacobs describes her life from a young age living as a slave in North Carolina. What follows is a harrowing narrative of sexual abuse and fight for survival. While the work was almost immediately overshadowed by the start of the American Civil War it has since found its place as one of the most important of all the slave narratives distinguishing itself as one of the first from the female perspective.
A remarkable intellectual history of the slave revolts that made the modern revolutionary era. Out of the grey expanse of official records in Spanish, English and French, The Common Wind provides a gripping and colorful account of inter-continental communication networks that tied together the free and enslaved masses of the new world. A powerful “history from below,” this book follows those “rumors of emancipation” and the people who spread them, bringing to life the protagonists in the revolution against slavery. Since this study’s completion at Duke University in 1986, achieving decades of wide acclaim by leading historians of slavery and the new world, it has been newly released by Verso with a forward from Marcus Rediker.
Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women & Everyday Resistance
Stephanie Camp examines the everyday containment and movement of enslaved men and, especially, enslaved women. In her investigation of the movement of bodies, objects, and information, Camp extends our recognition of slave resistance into new arenas and reveals an important and hidden culture of opposition. Camp discusses the multiple dimensions to acts of resistance that might otherwise appear to be little more than fits of temper. Illegal parties (“frolics”) become an expression of bodily freedom. And bondwomen who acquired printed abolitionist materials and posted them on the walls of their slave cabins (even if they could not read them) become the subtle agitators who inspire more overt acts. The culture of opposition created by enslaved women’s acts of everyday resistance helped foment and sustain the more visible resistance of men in their individual acts of running away and in the collective action of slave revolts. Ultimately, Camp argues, the Civil War years saw revolutionary change that had been in the making for decades.
Black Reconstruction in America
Published in 1935, this pioneering work is the study of the role of Black Americans during Reconstruction by the most influential Black intellectual of his time. The pioneering work was the first full-length study of the role black Americans played in the crucial period after the Civil War, when the slaves had been freed and the attempt was made to reconstruct American society. Hailed at the time, Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880 has justly been called a classic.
Water From the Rock – Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age
The era of the American Revolution was one of violent and unpredictable social, economic, and political change, and the dislocations of the period were most severely felt in the South. Sylvia Frey contends that the military struggle there involved a triangle–two sets of white belligerents and approximately 400,000 slaves. She reveals the dialectical relationships between slave resistance and Britain’s Southern Strategy and between slave resistance and the white independence movement among Southerners, and shows how how these relationships transformed religion, law, and the economy during the postwar years.
African-American Patriots in the Southern Campaign of the American Revolution
Provides biographical and military service information on African-Americans who participated with American forces patriots in the southern campaign of the American Revolution. The coverage area includes Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina,Georgia, and Florida.
‘They Were Good Soldiers’: African–Americans Serving in the Continental Army, 1775-1783
The role of African-Americans, most free but some enslaved, in the regiments of the Continental Army is not well-known; neither is the fact that relatively large numbers served in southern regiments and that the greatest number served alongside their white comrades in integrated units. They Were Good Soldiers begins by discussing, for comparison, the inclusion and treatment of black Americans by the various Crown forces (particularly British and Loyalist commanders, and military units). The narrative then moves into an overview of black soldiers in the Continental Army, before examining their service state by state. They Were Good Soldiers makes extensive use of black veterans’ pension narratives to ‘hear’ them and others tell their stories, and provides insights into their lives, before, during, and after the war.
The Negro in the American Revolution
Reprint of the 1940 historical text. Herbert Aptheker was one of the leading scholars of African American Studies. He wrote more than fifty books, mostly in the fields of African American History. His American Negro Slave Revolts (1943) is considered a classic in the field. He also compiled the seven volume Documentary History of the Negro People. In addition, he compiled a wide variety of primary documents supporting study of African-American history.
American Negro Slave RevoltsThe 1943 ground-breaking masterpiece and classic text on the history of slave revolts in America. Herbert Aptheker was considered the leading scholar of African American History and had written dozens of texts and articles on the subject. He compiled the one of the most complete documentation on African American History, his seven volume Documentary History of the Negro People. He was an avid speaker and lecturer on anti-racism and literary executor for W. E. B. Du Bois, the great civil rights activist and prolific author on African American Issues and Scientific Studies.
From the Boston Massacre and the battles at Lexington and Concord to the final British surrender at Yorktown, a compelling and informative study chronicles the contributions of African-American soldiers to the colonial struggle for freedom during the Revolutionary War.
Instant New York Times Bestseller
“May this book cast its spell on all of us, restore to us some memory of our most warrior and softest selves.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A new kind of epic…A grand achievement…While The Prophets‘ dreamy realism recalls the work of Toni Morrison…its penetrating focus on social dynamics stands out more singularly.” —Entertainment Weekly
A singular and stunning debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence.