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

Learn basic history by visiting communities from our past. Each book is filled with photos and reconstruction artwork covering topics such as food, clothing, shelter, education, play, communication, and family life. View important political and geographical events through the lens of everyday life.

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.'"

Jacob Stroyer was born a slave on the Singleton plantation near Columbia, South Carolina in 1849 and lived there until the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in 1864. During the Civil War, he was sent to Sullivan's Island and Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, where he waited on Confederate officers. While there, Stroyer learned to read. Following his release from slavery, Jacob Stroyer settled in Salem, Massachusetts, and became minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church there. This new and enlarged edition of Stroyer's narrative, My Life in the South, expands upon earlier editions, and was written with the hope of generating enough income to complete his education. The narrative covers his fifteen years in slavery providing information about his family, his life at his master's summer seat as well as the physical abuse he endured at the hands of the Singleton plantation's overseer. Stroyer also discusses the emotional strain that the slave trade put on his and other slave families and provides a series of brief anecdotes about slave life, culture, beliefs, and interactions with masters and slaves.

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.

Working Cures explores black health under slavery showing how herbalism, conjuring, midwifery and other African American healing practices became arts of resistance in the antebellum South and invoked conflicts.

Caitlin Rosenthal explores quantitative management practices on West Indian and Southern plantations, showing how planter-capitalists built sophisticated organizations and used complex accounting tools. By demonstrating that business innovation can be a byproduct of bondage Rosenthal further erodes the false boundary between capitalism and slavery.

Old Plantation Days is a memoir in the form of a letter that Nancy Bostick writes reflecting on her life on a plantation and her marriage and parenthood afterward during the Civil War. Excerpt: The South as I knew it has disappeared; the New South has risen from its ashes, filled with the energetic spirit of a new age.