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"Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation. After his rescue, Northup published...
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English
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Set after the American Civil War (1861-1865), the novel is inspired by the story of an African American slave, Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky late January 1856 by fleeing to Ohio, a free state. In the novel, the protagonist Sethe is also a slave who escapes slavery, running to Cincinnati, Ohio. After twenty-eight days of freedom, a posse arrives to retrieve her and her children under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave slave...
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Description
"In the fall of 1863, the Union Army is in control of the Mississippi River. Much of Louisiana, including New Orleans and Baton Rouge, is occupied. The Confederate Army is in disarray, corrupt structures are falling apart, and enslaved men and women are beginning to glimpse freedom. When Hannah Laveau, an enslaved woman working on the Lufkin plantation, is accused of murder, she goes on the run with Florence Milton, an abolitionist schoolteacher,...
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English
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"The classic boyhood adventure tale, updated with a new introduction by noted Mark Twain scholar R. Kent Rasmussen In recent years, neither the persistent effort to "clean up" the racial epithets in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn nor its consistent use in the classroom have diminished, highlighting the novel's wide-ranging influence and its continued importance in American society. An incomparable adventure story, it is a vignette of...
Author
Language
English
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Description
"In Sweet Taste of Liberty, W. Caleb McDaniel focuses on the experience of a freed slave who was sold back into slavery, eventually freed again, and who then sued the man who had sold her back into bondage. Henrietta Wood was born into slavery, but in 1848, she was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed. In 1855, however, a wealthy Kentucky businessman named Zebulon Ward, who colluded with Wood's employer, abducted Wood and sold her back into bondage....
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Description
Presents the remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise, with Ellen passing as a wealthy, disabled white man and William posing as "his" slave.
In December 1848, a young enslaved couple named Ellen and William Craft traveled openly by rail, coach and steamship from Macon, Georgia, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ellen, who passed for white, disguised herself as a wealthy disabled...
Author
Pub. Date
2013
Language
English
Formats
Description
A novel of love, family, and justice follows Lina Sparrow, an ambitious first-year associate in a Manhattan law firm, as she searches for the "perfect plaintiff" to lead a historic class-action lawsuit worth trillions of dollars in reparations for descendants of American slaves.
8) Kindred
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Series
Language
English
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Dana, a black woman, finds herself repeatedly transported to the antebellum South, where she must make sure that Rufus, the plantation owner's son, survives to father Dana's ancestor.
9) Choke point
Author
Series
Publisher
Penguin Publishing Group
Pub. Date
2013
Language
English
Formats
Description
Hired to investigate allegations of a sweat-shop operation in Amsterdam that is enslaving young girls, Knox and tech information expert Grace Chu embark on a rescue mission that is challenged by a crime organization that has seduced local neighborhoods with showy goodwill practices.
11) James: a novel
Author
Pub. Date
2024
Language
English
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Description
"From Percival Everett-a recipient of the NBCC Lifetime Achievement Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Booker Prize, and numerous PEN awards-comes James, a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby...
Author
Series
Publisher
Easton Press
Pub. Date
c1979
Language
English
Description
"Describing the many trials and eventual escape to freedom of the long-suffering, good-hearted slave Uncle Tom, it aimed to show how Christian love can overcome any human cruelty. Uncle Tom's Cabin has remained controversial to this day, seen as either a vital milestone in the anti-slavery cause or as a patronising stereotype of African-Americans, yet it played a crucial role in the eventual abolition of slavery and remains one of the most important...
Author
Publisher
Simon & Schuster Audio
Pub. Date
2014
Language
English
Description
On the Caribbean island of Saint Domingue, an island consumed by the flames of revolution, a senseless attack leaves only one survivor-- an infant girl who falls into the hands of two French émigrés. They take the beautiful child they call Ruth to the bustling American city of Savannah. What follows is the sweeping tale of Ruth's life as shaped by her strong-willed mistress and other larger-than-life personalities she encounters in the South. At...
Author
Pub. Date
2016
Language
English
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Description
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway,...
Author
Series
Kitchen house volume 1
Language
English
Formats
Description
"In 1790, Lavinia, a seven-year-old Irish orphan with no memory of her past, arrives on a tobacco plantation where she is put to work as an indentured servant with the kitchen house slaves. Though she becomes deeply bonded to her new family, Lavinia is also slowly accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. As time passes she finds herself perilously straddling two very different worlds...
19) On Juneteenth
Author
Pub. Date
2021
Language
English
Formats
Description
""It is staggering that there is no date commemorating the end of slavery in the United States." -Annette Gordon-Reed. The essential, sweeping story of Juneteenth's integral importance to American history, as told by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Texas native. Interweaving American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed, the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas in the 1850s, recounts...
Author
Language
English
Description
More than a decade ago, Mira fled her segregated hometown of Kipsen, leaving behind her best friend, the white Celine, and Woodsman Plantation - rumored to be haunted by the spirits of slaves. Now, Mira is back in Kipsen for Celine's wedding weekend at that same plantation. Mira hopes to reconnect with her old friends, especially Jesse, the boy she secretly loved. Woodsman remains a monument to its racist history and the darkest elements of the plantation's...