They lived with professors and waited on former presidents. They were masons and nurses, school teachers and field hands, 246 people owned by a man who struggled with the institution of slavery. Yet, almost no one knows their names. When a white woman begins to study the history of the plantations these people built, the plantations where she was raised, she discovers that the silence around these people's lives speaks of a silence in her country's history . . . and in her own life. A creative nonfiction, history book about American slavery and its legacy in the United States. "In the late afternoons sometimes, I walk up and talk to the folks who are buried in the undulating earth, most of their graves are unmarked by any stone except, perhaps, two pieces of slate stuck vertically in the ground, one at head and one at foot, and long worn down or washed clean of names. But three stones bear words, gifts cut into rock - Ben Creasy, the carpenter, Jesse Nicholas, the stonemason, and Primus, the foreman. Ben and Jesse's stones are clear - with their names and dates marked deeply in the sandstone. I can find them in the records - know for sure who they are. Primus's stone is harder to know. The tradition here on the farm is that Primus the foreman at Upper Bremo is buried here, but I cannot be sure. The stone reads "Prams - 12," and I'm not sure that it refers to this Primus. It may be his grandson, also Primus, or some person I don't know yet. It's the 12 that throws me - the Primus I know lived to be an old man, long past 1812 - his death date is noted - 1849. That date seems right according to the records, but then, the records are so sparse; it's hard to know. I don't know how to solidify - to give storied flesh - to these rough marks hewn deep into stone."

A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the mistreatment of black Americans. In this 'precise and eloquent work' - as described in its Pulitzer Prize citation - Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an 'Age of Neoslavery' that thrived in the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude thereafter. By turns moving, sobering and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals these stories, the companies that profited the most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.

Fifteen years after its hardcover debut, the FSG Classics reissue of the celebrated work of narrative nonfiction that won the National Book Award and changed the American conversation about race, with a new preface by the author The Ball family hails from South Carolina—Charleston and thereabouts. Their plantations were among the oldest and longest-standing plantations in the South. Between 1698 and 1865, close to four thousand black people were born into slavery under the Balls or were bought by them. In Slaves in the Family, Edward Ball recounts his efforts to track down and meet the descendants of his family's slaves. Part historical narrative, part oral history, part personal story of investigation and catharsis, Slaves in the Family is, in the words of Pat Conroy, "a work of breathtaking generosity and courage, a magnificent study of the complexity and strangeness and beauty of the word ‘family.'"

In this new interpretation of antebellum slavery, Anthony Kaye offers a vivid portrait of slaves transforming adjoining plantations into slave neighborhoods. He describes men and women opening paths from their owners' plantations to adjacent farms to go courting and take spouses, to work, to run away, and to otherwise contend with owners and their agents. In the course of cultivating family ties, forging alliances, working, socializing, and storytelling, slaves fashioned their neighborhoods into the locus of slave society. Joining Places is the first book about slavery to use the pension files of former soldiers in the Union army, a vast source of rich testimony by ex-slaves. From these detailed accounts, Kaye tells the stories of men and women in love, "sweethearting," "taking up," "living together," and marrying across plantation lines; striving to get right with God; carving out neighborhoods as a terrain of struggle; and working to overthrow the slaveholders' regime. Kaye's depiction of slaves' sense of place in the Natchez District of Mississippi reveals a slave society that comprised not a single, monolithic community but an archipelago of many neighborhoods. Demonstrating that such neighborhoods prevailed across the South, he reformulates ideas about slave marriage, resistance, independent production, paternalism, autonomy, and the slave community that have defined decades of scholarship.

A thought-provoking and important book that raises essential issues crucial not only for understanding our past but also the present day. In this panoramic history, Jeremy Black tells how slavery was first developed in the ancient world, and reaches all the way to the present in the form of contemporary crimes such as trafficking and bonded labour. He shows how slavery has taken many forms throughout history and across the world - from the uprising of Spartacus, the plantations of the West Indies, and the murderous forced labour of the gulags and concentration camps. Slavery helped to consolidate transoceanic empires and helped mould new world societies such as America and Brazil. Black charts the long fight for abolition in the nineteenth century, looking at both the campaigners as well as the harrowing accounts of the enslaved themselves. Slavery is still with us today, and coerced labour can be found closer to home than one might expect.

This collection of slave narratives includes an additional chapter, "Ex-slave interviews and the historiography of slavery," originally published in 1984 in American Quarterly.