"... updated to address a decade of new scholarship, the book includes a new preface, afterword, and revised and expanded bibliographic essay."--from publisher description.

This “important and timely” (Drew Faust, Harvard Magazine) #1 New York Times bestseller examines the legacy of slavery in America—and how both history and memory continue to shape our everyday lives. Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves. It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers. A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted. Informed by scholarship and brought to life by the story of people living today, Smith's debut work of nonfiction is a landmark of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Winner of the Stowe Prize Winner of 2022 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021

No topic in U.S. history is as emotionally fraught, or as widely taught, as the nation's centuries-long entanglement with slavery. This volume offers advice to college and high school instructors to help their students grapple with this challenging history and its legacies.

Invites readers to revisit the past and see what it was like to grow up as a slave in America.

If you're new to authentic Southern history, or you're just fed up with the mountain of lies, slander, disinformation, and pro-North propaganda found in our South-bashing history books, "Everything You Were Taught About American Slavery is Wrong, Ask a Southerner!" will be a joyful revelation. This important 1,000 page work by award-winning author, Southern historian, and slavery scholar Lochlainn Seabrook decimates the fictitious, deceitful, purposefully misleading view of slavery annually churned out by Yankee mythologists, writers, filmmakers, and bloggers. Lavishly illustrated with over 500 rare and intriguing images, a helpful world slavery time line, and a detailed index of significant historical figures, Mr. Seabrook lays out the truth about the "peculiar institution," a truth that has been nefariously suppressed for centuries by enemies of the South and the politically correct. Did you know, for instance, that Africa was enslaving her own people thousands of years before the transatlantic slave trade; that white American slavery laid the foundation for black American slavery; that Africa enslaved 1.5 million whites in the 1700s; that genuine slavery was never practiced in the American South; that both the American slave trade and slavery got their start in the North; that the American abolition movement began in the South; that five times more blacks fought for the Confederacy than for the Union? Did you know that there were thousands of African-American and Native-American slave owners in early America, and that less than 5 percent of white Southerners owned slaves; that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave-and was not meant to; that until the last day of his life Abraham Lincoln campaigned to have all blacks deported to Africa; and that Jefferson Davis abolished the foreign slave trade before Lincoln did and adopted a black boy during the War? These and thousands of other little known facts will astound, fascinate, and enlighten. In support of his in-depth research the author provides hundreds of eyewitness accounts - dating from the 1600s to the early 20th Century - firsthand testimony clearly illustrating how American slavery came to be, how it was actually practiced, and how both European-Americans and African-Americans viewed it and experienced it. With 21 chapters, nearly 3,500 endnotes, and a comprehensive 2,000 book bibliography, this well investigated yet easy-to-read work - the result of over 20 years of research - is a must-read for every serious student of American history, Southern history, and American slavery. Its release will require every history book to be rewritten. You will never look at slavery the same way again. The foreword is by African-American educator Barbara G. Marthal, B.A., M.Ed. Civil War scholar Lochlainn Seabrook, a recipient of the prestigious Jefferson Davis Historical Gold Medal and a descendant of numerous Confederate soldiers, is the sixth great-grandson of the Earl of Oxford and the author of over forty popular books for all ages. A seventh-generation Kentuckian of Appalachian heritage who is known as the "new Shelby Foote," Seabrook has a forty-year background in the American Civil War, Confederate studies, Southern biography, and international slavery, and is the author of the companion bestseller, "Everything You Were Taught About the Civil War is Wrong, Ask a Southerner!"

The groundbreaking, bestselling history of slavery, with a new foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed With the publication of the 1619 Project and the national reckoning over racial inequality, the story of slavery has gripped America’s imagination—and conscience—once again. No group of people better understood the power of slavery’s legacies than the last generation of American people who had lived as slaves. Little-known before the first publication of Remembering Slavery over two decades ago, their memories were recorded on paper, and in some cases on primitive recording devices, by WPA workers in the 1930s. A major publishing event, Remembering Slavery captured these extraordinary voices in a single volume for the first time, presenting them as an unprecedented, first-person history of slavery in America. Remembering Slavery received the kind of commercial attention seldom accorded projects of this nature—nationwide reviews as well as extensive coverage on prime-time television, including Good Morning America, Nightline, CBS Sunday Morning, and CNN. Reviewers called the book “chilling . . . [and] riveting” (Publishers Weekly) and “something, truly, truly new” (The Village Voice). With a new foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar Annette Gordon-Reed, this new edition of Remembering Slavery is an essential text for anyone seeking to understand one of the most basic and essential chapters in our collective history.