Although the importance of slavery to Greek society has long been recognised, most studies have primarily drawn upon representations of slaves as sources of evidence for the historical institution, while there has been little consideration of what the representations can tell us about how the Greeks perceived slaves and why. Although historical reality clearly played a part in the way slaves were represented, Reconstructing the Slave stresses that this was not the primary purpose of these images, which reveal more about how slave-owners perceived or wanted to perceive slaves than the reality of slavery. Through an examination of lexical, visual and literary representations of slaves, the book considers how the image of the slave was used to justify, reinforce and naturalize slavery in ancient Greece.

Assessing a unique collection of more than eighty images, this innovative study of visual culture reveals the productive organization of plantation landscapes in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These landscapes—from cotton fields in the Lower Mississippi Valley to sugar plantations in western Cuba and coffee plantations in Brazil's Paraiba Valley—demonstrate how the restructuring of the capitalist world economy led to the formation of new zones of commodity production. By extension, these environments radically transformed slave labor and the role such labor played in the expansion of the global economy. Artists and mapmakers documented in surprising detail how the physical organization of the landscape itself made possible the increased exploitation of enslaved labor. Reading these images today, one sees how technologies combined with evolving conceptions of plantation management that reduced enslaved workers to black bodies. Planter control of enslaved people's lives and labor maximized the production of each crop in a calculated system of production. Nature, too, was affected: the massive increase in the scale of production and new systems of cultivation increased the land's output. Responding to world economic conditions, the replication of slave-based commodity production became integral to the creation of mass markets for cotton, sugar, and coffee, which remain at the center of contemporary life.

Recovers the voices, experiences and agency of enslaved people in ancient Greece.

The pioneering work in the study of the role of Black Americans during Reconstruction by the most influential Black intellectual of his time. This 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.

This books aims to develop curriculum approaches and material appropriate to black students that can enhance their personal development, self-esteem, competence, and understanding of society, while it helps young whites develop a greater understanding of the contributions made by black people to history and social development. The context is that of the English school system. Images from art are used as stimuli, and the social and historical realities relating to images are linked to produce departure points for further study and research. Section 1 focuses on "White History and the Distortion of Black History." In section 2, the topic is "African Reactions to Slavery and Colonisation," while section 3 concentrates on "Religion and the Role of Black People." Section 4 considers"The Centuries of Struggle." A concluding chapter explores "Reconstructing the Black Image in the History National Curriculum."

Looks at the contest to construct history, focusing on competing versions of Reconstruction history supported by different factions after the Civil War. The author analyzes how the ultimately dominant version of the history won credence and how that in

Most histories of the Civil War era portray the struggle over slavery as a conflict that exclusively pitted North against South, free labor against slave labor, and black against white. In Freedom's Frontier, Stacey L. Smith examines the battle over slavery as it unfolded on the multiracial Pacific Coast. Despite its antislavery constitution, California was home to a dizzying array of bound and semibound labor systems: African American slavery, American Indian indenture, Latino and Chinese contract labor, and a brutal sex traffic in bound Indian and Chinese women. Using untapped legislative and court records, Smith reconstructs the lives of California's unfree workers and documents the political and legal struggles over their destiny as the nation moved through the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. Smith reveals that the state's anti-Chinese movement, forged in its struggle over unfree labor, reached eastward to transform federal Reconstruction policy and national race relations for decades to come. Throughout, she illuminates the startling ways in which the contest over slavery's fate included a western struggle that encompassed diverse labor systems and workers not easily classified as free or slave, black or white.