Vividly recounting the lives of enslaved women in eighteenth-century Bridgetown, Barbados, and their conditions of confinement through urban, legal, sexual, and representational power wielded by slave owners, authorities, and the archive, Marisa J. Fuentes challenges how histories of vulnerable and invisible subjects are written.

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.

Explores the relationship between the production of enslaved property and the production of the past in the antebellum United States. It is extraordinarily difficult for historians to reconstruct the lives of individual enslaved people. Records—where they exist—are often fragmentary, biased, or untrue. In Enslaved Archives, Maria R. Montalvo investigates the legal records, including contracts and court records, that American antebellum enslavers produced and preserved to illuminate enslavers' capitalistic motivations for shaping the histories of enslaved people. The documentary archive was not simply a by-product of the business of slavery, but also a necessary tool that enslavers used to exploit the people they enslaved. Building on Montalvo's analysis of more than 18,000 sets of court records, Enslaved Archives is a close study of what we can and cannot learn about enslaved individuals from the written record. By examining five lawsuits in Louisiana, Montalvo deconstructs enslavers' cases—the legal arguments and rhetorical strategies they used to produce information and shape perceptions of enslaved people. Commodifying enslaved people was not simply a matter of effectively exploiting their labor. Enslavers also needed to control information about those people. Enslavers' narratives—carefully manipulated, prone to omissions, and sometimes false—often survive as the only account of an enslaved individual's life. In working to historicize the people at the center of enslavers' manipulations, Montalvo outlines the possibilities and limits of the archive, providing a glimpse of the historical and contemporary consequences of commodification. Enslaved Archives makes a significant intervention in the history of enslaved people, legal history, and the history of slavery and capitalism by adding a qualitative dimension to the analysis of how enslavers created and maintained power.

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.'"

The largest mass escape of fugitive slaves in American history is thrillingly chronicled in this “readable . . . valuable account” (Kirkus). On the evening of April 15, 1848, nearly eighty enslaved Americans attempted one of history's most audacious escapes. Setting sail from Washington, D.C., on a schooner named the Pearl, the fugitives began a daring 225-mile journey to freedom in the North—and put in motion a furiously fought battle over slavery in America that would consume Congress, the streets of the capital, and the White House itself. Mary Kay Ricks's vivid history brings to life the Underground Railroad's largest escape attempt, the seemingly immutable politics of slavery, and the individuals who struggled to end it. Escape on the Pearl reveals the incredible odyssey of those who were onboard, including the remarkable lives of fugitives Mary and Emily Edmonson, the two sisters at the heart of this true story of courage and determination. The volume concludes with a thorough overview of the fates of the escapees and their descendants.

In this innovative study, Jenny Sharpe moves beyond the idea of art and literature as an alternative archive to the historical records of slavery and its aftermath. Immaterial Archives explores instead the intangible phenomena of affects, spirits, and dreams that Caribbean artists and writers introduce into existing archives. Through the works of Frantz Zéphirin, Edouard Duval-Carrié, M. NourbeSe Philip, Erna Brodber, and Kamau Brathwaite, Immaterial Archives examines silences as black female spaces, Afro-Creole sacred worlds as diasporic cartographies, and the imaginative conjoining of spirits with industrial technologies as disruptions of enlightened modernity.