Provides information about what daily life was like on a southern plantation, including how slaves worked and dressed and what they ate.

MY LIFE IN THE SOUTH is Jacob Stroyer's absorbing first person account of his experiences of life as a slave. Jacob Stroyer was born into slavery in 1849 on a large plantation in South Carolina. In 1864 after the Civil War ended, Stroyer moved north and became an African Methodist Episcopal minister in Salem Massachusetts. Originally published in 1879, Stroyer's records his memories of his life in the south. While he describes his experiences and the burdens of life as a slave along with the severity of the discipline on a plantation, he also includes some of the customs of both slaves and their owners.This new and enlarged edition was printed in 1885 and is considered a valuable resource for all ages.

Richard Dunn reconstructs the lives of three generations of slaves on a sugar estate in Jamaica and a plantation in Virginia, to understand the starkly different forms slavery took. Deadly work regimens and rampant disease among Jamaican slaves contrast with population expansion in Virginia leading to the selling of slaves and breakup of families.

This book details the living conditions of plantation slaves, examining house, field and artisan work, food and clothing, marriage, and more.

Decades after this celebrated work of narrative nonfiction won the National Book Award and changed the American conversation about race, Slaves in the Family is reissued by FSG Classics, 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.'"