None but those who resided in the South during the time of slavery can realize the terrible punishments that were visited upon the slaves. Virtue and self-respect were denied them.-Octavia Albert in The House of BondageWith a fiery, righteous rage, former slave Octavia Albert set about, after Emancipation, collecting the true stories of those that "terrible institution" affected most. That raw material gave rise to The House of Bondage, a refutation to Uncle Tom's Cabin, and an answer to other works of literature of the period that purported to show the horror of slavery even though their authors had never set foot in the South. First published in 1890, this is an important example of a sadly small genre: 19th-century literature by African-American women.With its straightforward and heartbreaking litany of cruelty at the hands of slaveowners, families forever divided, and the harsh effects of particularly hard labor, this is an unforgettable work that should be read by every American who thinks he knows his nation's history.Teacher and social activist OCTAVIA V. ROGERS ALBERT (1853-c.1890) was born into slavery in Georgia; after Emancipation, she studied at Atlanta University.

The plantation household was, first and foremost, a site of production. This fundamental fact has generally been overshadowed by popular and scholarly images of the plantation household as the source of slavery's redeeming qualities, where 'gentle' mistresses ministered to 'loyal' slaves. This book recounts a very different story. The very notion of a private sphere, as divorced from the immoral excesses of chattel slavery as from the amoral logic of market laws, functioned to conceal from public scrutiny the day-to-day struggles between enslaved women and their mistresses, subsumed within a logic of patriarchy. One of emancipation's unsung consequences was precisely the exposure to public view of the unbridgeable social distance between the women on whose labor the plantation household relied and the women who employed them. This is a story of race and gender, nation and citizenship, freedom and bondage in the nineteenth century South; a big abstract story that is composed of equally big personal stories.

One of the frankest books ever done on South Africa. -Robert Cromie, Chicago Tribune First published in the US in 1967 and in Britain in 1968, House of Bondage presented images from South Africa that shocked the world. The young African photographer Ernest Cole had left his country at 26 to find an audience for his stunning exposure of the system of racial dominance known as apartheid. In 185 photographs, Cole's book showed from the vantage point of the oppressed how the system closely regulated and controlled the lives of the black majority. He saw every aspect of this oppression with a searching eye and a passionate heart. House of Bondage is a milestone in the history of documentary photography, even though it was immediately banned in South Africa. In a Chicago Tribune review, Robert Cromie described it as "one of the frankest books ever done on South Africa--with photographs by a native of that country who would be most unwise to attempt to return for some years." Cole died in exile in 1990 as the regime was collapsing, never knowing when his portrait of his homeland would finally find its way home. Not until the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg mounted enlarged pages of the book on its walls in 2001 were his people able to view these pictures, which are as powerful and provocative today as they were 50 years ago. Ernest Cole was born near Pretoria, South Africa, in 1940. Leaving school at 17 to become a photographer, he secured staff jobs and freelance assignments for newspapers and magazines for black people--honing his skills with a correspondence course from the New York Institute of Photography. Inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson's book The People of Moscow, in 1960 Cole embarked on a project to document the lives of his people, which resulted in House of Bondage.

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Paul Evans, a former Baltimore newspaperman, uses the power of poetry to present a unique look at the decency and respectability of black Americans' lives before, during, and after the Civil Rights Movement in tribute to the Harlem Renaissance. However, Mr. Evans does not stop there. Uniquely, writing as a black man, he also offers poems that express his desire to see a nation that is inclusive and fair to all Americans, not overlooking the working-class white people who have been left out of Martin Luther King's dream. The Harlem Renaissance has taken its rightful place alongside the many literary movements and eras that have comprised American Literature. Through expressive verse, Mr. Evans reflects on the simplicity of an earlier time in a black man's life such as tending a coal furnace, talking to the ice cream man, or in "A Colored Boy at the Ocean" when he writes, Ocean, ocean carry me away/I'm a little colored boy here at play/I care not where your waves might take me to go/As long as getting there is mighty awfully slow. He honors the spirited artists, musicians, and writers who created magic during a dazzling period in American culture. As the centennial of the Harlem Renaissance approaches in 2019, Mr. Evans encourages a revisiting to this special time, resulting in a new appreciation of the importance of the work of the renaissance's writers and poets, in particular, whose work urged America to be what it says it is.