I was born in Virginia, in 1832, near Charlottesville, in the beautiful valley of the Rivanna river. My father was a white man and my mother a negress, the slave of one John Martin. I was a mere child, probably not more than six years of age, as I remember, when my mother, two brothers and myself were sold to Dr. Louis, a practicing physician in the village of Scottsville. We remained with him about five years, when he died, and, in the settlement of his estate, I was sold to one Washington Fitzpatrick, a merchant of the village. He kept me a short time when he took me to Richmond, by way of canal-boat, expecting to sell me; but as the market was dull, he brought me back and kept me some three months longer, when he told me he had hired me out to work on a canal-boat running to Richmond, and to go to my mother and get my clothes ready to start on the trip. I went to her as directed, and, when she had made ready my bundle, she bade me good-by with tears in her eyes, saying: "My son, be a good boy; be polite to every one, and always behave yourself properly."

Part slave narrative, part memoir, and part sentimental fiction Behind the Scenes depicts Elizabeth Keckley's years as a salve and subsequent four years in Abraham Lincoln's White House during the Civil War. Through the eyes of this black woman, we see a wide range of historical figures and events of the antebellum South, the Washington of the Civil War years, and the final stages of the war.

Firsthand accounts of escapes from slavery in the American South include narratives by Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman as well as lesser-known travelers of the Underground Railroad.

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.

Shares the stories of Wallace Turnage and John Washington, former slaves who, in the midst of chaos during the Civil War, escaped to the North and lived to tell about their experiences.

A startling and eye-opening look into America’s First Family, Never Caught is the powerful story about a daring woman of “extraordinary grit” (The Philadelphia Inquirer). When George Washington was elected president, he reluctantly left behind his beloved Mount Vernon to serve in Philadelphia, the temporary seat of the nation’s capital. In setting up his household he brought along nine slaves, including Ona Judge. As the President grew accustomed to Northern ways, there was one change he couldn’t abide: Pennsylvania law required enslaved people be set free after six months of residency in the state. Rather than comply, Washington decided to circumvent the law. Every six months he sent the slaves back down south just as the clock was about to expire. Though Ona Judge lived a life of relative comfort, she was denied freedom. So, when the opportunity presented itself one clear and pleasant spring day in Philadelphia, Judge left everything she knew to escape to New England. Yet freedom would not come without its costs. At just twenty-two-years-old, Ona became the subject of an intense manhunt led by George Washington, who used his political and personal contacts to recapture his property. “A crisp and compulsively readable feat of research and storytelling” (USA TODAY), historian and National Book Award finalist Erica Armstrong Dunbar weaves a powerful tale and offers fascinating new scholarship on how one young woman risked everything to gain freedom from the famous founding father and most powerful man in the United States at the time.