San Antonio College Library

Examines the experience of slavery suffered by blacks in the United States from 1619 to the post-Civil War Reconstruction period.

"Groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early America The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives--including from before birth to after death--in the American domestic slave trades. Covering the full "life cycle" (including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior...

This book reworks classic literary texts to explore the unconventional union of slave-marriage. It unravels the interconnections between marriage, slavery, and freedom through renewed readings of canonical nineteenth-century novels and short stories by black and white authors. The author mines antislavery and post Civil War fiction to extract literary representations of slave-marriage, revealing how these texts and their public responses took aim...

"In the years just before the Civil War, during the most intensive phase of American slave-trade suppression, the U.S. Navy seized roughly 2,000 enslaved Africans from illegal slave ships and brought them into temporary camps at Key West and Charleston. In this study, Sharla Fett reconstructs the social world of these "recaptives" and recounts the relationships they built to survive the holds of slave ships, American detention camps, and, ultimately,...

"One of the greatest African American leaders and one of the most brilliant minds of his time, Frederick Douglass spoke and wrote with unsurpassed eloquence on almost all the major issues confronting the American people during his life - from the abolition of slavery to women's rights, from the Civil War to lynching, from American patriotism to black nationalism." "Between 1950 and 1975, Philip S. Foner collected the most important of Douglass's hundreds...

"Each of the collected narratives includes an introduction that provides readers with key historical context on the particular life examined. Moreover, each narrative is accompanied by annotations that broaden the reader's comprehension of that primary document. The primary source documents in this volume tell enthralling stories, such as how slave woman Ellen Craft utilized her particularly pale complexion to pose as a free white man overseeing his...