To Be a Slave stands apart from other historical accounts of slavery in one extraordinary way: it is told by the slaves themselves. Their stories will tell you what it felt like to be a slave in the United States-to wear shackles on your ankles, to feel whips lashing your back, and to work under the cruelest conditions. From African villages to Georgian auction blocks, from plantation fields to abolitionist hideaways, To Be a Slave brings one of the...

"Describes slavery in the United States from colonial times up to the Civil War"--Provided by publisher.

"A groundbreaking synthesis of food studies, archival theory, and early American literature"--

"Analyzing published and archival oral histories of formerly enslaved African Americans, Libra R. Hilde explores the meanings of manhood and fatherhood during and after the era of slavery, demonstrating that Black men and women articulated a surprisingly broad and consistent vision of paternal duty across more than a century. Complicating the tendency among historians to conflate masculinity within slavery with heroic resistance, Hilde emphasizes...

"Within a few years of the invention of the first commercially successful photography process in 1839, American slaveholders had already begun commissioning photographic portraits of their slaves. Ex-slaves-turned-abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass also came to see how sitting for a portrait could help them project humanity and dignity amidst northern racism. In the first decade of the medium, enslaved people had begun entering southern daguerreotype...

Explains the early plight of the slaves and their run for freedom during and after the Civil War.

"In The Ledger and the Chain, prize-winning historian Joshua D. Rothman tells the disturbing story of the Franklin and Armfield company and the men who built it into the largest and most powerful slave trading company in the United States. In so doing, he reveals the central importance of the domestic slave trade to the development of American capitalism and the expansion of the American nation. Few slave traders were more successful than Isaac Franklin,...