San Antonio College Library

This dramatic autobiography of the early life of an American slave was first published in 1845, when its young author had just achieved his freedom. Douglass' eloquence gives a clear indication of the powerful principles that led him to become the first great African-American leader in the United States. The personal account of a fugitive slave's privation and sufferings and his campaigns for Negro emancipation. This dramatic autobiography of the...

Moral reform movements targeting racial minorities have long been central in negotiating the relationship between race and class in the United States, particularly in periods of large scale social change. Over a century ago, when the abolition of racial slavery, Southern Reconstruction, industrialization, and urban migration presented challenges to both race and class hierarchies in the South, postbellum missionary reform organizations like the American...

"More than a century before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, African American New Englanders through sit-ins, boycotts, petition drives, and other initiatives struggled for equal rights. Jim Crow North is the tale of that struggle and of the racism that prompted it." --

In Almost Free, Eva Sheppard Wolf uses the story of Samuel Johnson, a free black man from Virginia attempting to free his family, to add detail and depth to our understanding of the lives of free blacks in the South.

"Impassioned antislavery activists, writers, and orators made antebellum Boston famous as the nation's hub of radical abolitionism. For its Black workers, however, Boston was far from a beacon of equality. In No Right to an Honest Living, Bancroft Prize-winning historian Jacqueline Jones offers a searing portrait of Black labor and white hypocrisy in nineteenth-century Boston. The city, she reveals, was the United States writ small: A place where...

This volume explores the roles black women played in their communities' social movements and the consequences of elevating women into positions of visibility and leadership. Martha Jones reveals how, throughout the 19th century, the "woman question" was at the core of movements against slavery and for civil rights.

How did it feel to be bought and sold like cattle, only to be liberated with nowhere to go and no one to turn to for help? In this profoundly moving program, Ted Koppel of ABC News presents the African-American slave experience in the voices of those who knew it firsthand. Thanks to tapes-now digitally remastered-from a project undertaken during the 1930s and 40s by John Henry Falke and others, 101-year-old Fountain Hughes, who was born in 1848, and...

"Provides an unsurpassed look at what it meant to grow up as a slave in the antebellum South. Schwartz recreates the experiences of these bound but resilient young people as they learned to negotiate between acts of submission and selfhood, between the worlds of commodity and community."--Jacket.

Monash University (Australia) history professor Keith P. Wilson outlines three broad purposes in writing his new book on the camp life of the American Civil War's United States Colored Troops (USCT): "to describe the soldiers' lives ... to bring into focus the emotional texture of military life ... [and] to analyze the process of cultural change that occurred within the army camps" (xiii). Why camp life? As Wilson states, camp life helped the African-American,...