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.

Commanding a vast historiography of slavery and emancipation, Aline Helg reveals as never before how significant numbers of enslaved Africans across the entire Western Hemisphere managed to free themselves hundreds of years before the formation of white-run abolitionist movements. Her sweeping view of resistance and struggle covers more than three centuries, from early colonization to the American and Haitian revolutions, Spanish American independence, and abolition in the British Caribbean. Helg not only underscores the agency of those who managed to become "free people of color" before abolitionism took hold but also assesses in detail the specific strategies they created and utilized. While recognizing the powerful forces supporting slavery, Helg articulates four primary liberation strategies: flight and marronage; manumission by legal document; military service, for men, in exchange for promised emancipation; and revolt—along with a willingness to exploit any weakness in the domination system. Helg looks at such actions at both individual and community levels and in the context of national and international political movements. Bringing together the broad currents of liberal abolitionism with an original analysis of forms of manumission and marronage, Slave No More deepens our understanding of how enslaved men, women, and even children contributed to the slow demise of slavery.

Three essays present an introduction and history of the emancipation of the slaves during the Civil War.

Combines first-person historical accounts, traditional black spirituals, and passages about the daily lives of slaves to provide a chronicle of slavery in America.

However urban slave societies might have differed from their rural counterparts, they still relied on a concerted assault on the psychological, social, and cultural identity of their African-descended inhabitants to maintain power and control. This ambitious book looks at how people of African descent in two such societies--Havana and New Orleans in the nineteenth century--created and maintained their own forms of cultural resistance to the slave regime's assault and, in the process, put forth autonomous views of sell and the social landscape. In Havana's annual Dia de Reyes festival and in the weekly activities that took place at New Orleans's Congo Square, author Daniel Walker identities specific cultural beliefs and activities that Africans brought to the New World and modified in order to withstand and contest the dehumanizing effects of oppression. "No More, No More crosses disciplinary boundaries as well, elucidating the economic, social, cultural, and demographic operations at work in two cities and the wide-scale efforts at cultural resistance embodied in public performances.

"Between 1820 and 1861 more than 12,000 American blacks made the long voyage to Liberia. Many were members of families that had been brought to America in the 1600s. In the jungles of West Africa these new settlers battled virulent tropical diseases, marauding wild beasts, and fierce native tribesmen; with only basic hand tools (draft animals could hardly survive the climate) they faced the challenge of carving out fields from one of the world's densest forests. To former masters and to their own people the new Liberians wrote letters about physical deprivations, often asking for help; they also reported proudly on the political progress of their adopted country, which became a republic in 1847. Despite the discouragement and disappointment reflected in many of the letters, the settlers demonstrated a remarkable capacity to overcome the hostility of nature and to endure with courage and dignity. Bell I. Wiley has collected and annotated 273 letters written from Liberia by former slaves... To read the letters is to reach a new understanding of the meaning of slavery and of freedom; one senses the strength of the black family that distance did not splinter; one wonders at the religious faith that endured through the unimagined hardships and disasters"--

Hundreds of diet books have been written on the subject of weight loss. Perhaps you thought this was one of them? No, this is not a diet book! In fact, it defies all the existing diets. This book's approach to weight loss is about you-a holistic plan that focuses on you as an individual. As you explore the question "What am I?" you will discover that the tools you need to create lasting change already exist within you. Learn to use them, and your capabilities will seem almost magical-you will be empowered to make amazing strides in improving your overall wellness and losing weight-progress that used to feel impossible. Combining the best of Western and Eastern medicine, Svetlana Kogan, MD, guides you on a journey that will align your mind and body. The path to a healthier you doesn't have to be miserable. Diet Slave No More! makes the journey enjoyable and entertaining. No restrictions. No pills. Just-finally-weight loss that can last! To make this journey even more fun and easier, the author recommends a follow-through virtual companion phone app called "Diet Slave No More!" separately available on iPhone and Android platforms.

A historical novel to stir the heart! Katherine Ferguson's parents are slaves in the late 1700s. Her mother escapes to New York only to be sold into slavery yet again, this time with her newborn, Katy. As her mother faces being taken away, she prays a desperate prayer, giving the little Katy over to God. More Than a Slave is a story of perseverance and inspiration about Katherine Ferguson, who became a pioneer in the Sunday school movement.

The newly discovered slave narratives of John Washington and Wallace Turnage—and their harrowing and empowering journey to emancipation. Slave narratives, among the most powerful records of our past, are extremely rare, with only fifty-five surviving post-Civil War. This book is a major new addition to this imperative part of American history—the firsthand accounts of two slaves, John Washington and Wallace Turnage, who through a combination of intelligence, daring, and sheer luck, reached the protection of the occupying Union troops and found emancipation. In A Slave No More, David W. Blight enriches the authentic narrative texts of these two young men using a wealth of genealogical information, handed down through family and friends. Blight has reconstructed their childhoods as sons of white slaveholders, their service as cooks and camp hands during the Civil War, and their struggle to stable lives among the black working class in the north, where they reunited their families. In the previously unpublished manuscripts of Turnage and Washington, we find history at its most intimate, portals that offer a startling new answer to the question of how four million people moved from slavery to liberty. Here are the untold stories of two extraordinary men whose stories, once thought lost, now take their place at the heart of the American experience—as Blight rightfully calls them, “heroes of a war within the war.” “These powerful memoirs reveal poignant, heroic, painful and inspiring lives.”—Publishers Weekly

Today most Americans, black and white, identify slavery with cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after almost two hundred years of African-American life in mainland North America, few slaves grew cotton, lived in the deep South, or embraced Christianity. Many Thousands Gone traces the evolution of black society from the first arrivals in the early seventeenth century through the Revolution. In telling their story, Ira Berlin, a leading historian of southern and African-American life, reintegrates slaves into the history of the American working class and into the tapestry of our nation. Laboring as field hands on tobacco and rice plantations, as skilled artisans in port cities, or soldiers along the frontier, generation after generation of African Americans struggled to create a world of their own in circumstances not of their own making. In a panoramic view that stretches from the North to the Chesapeake Bay and Carolina lowcountry to the Mississippi Valley, Many Thousands Gone reveals the diverse forms that slavery and freedom assumed before cotton was king. We witness the transformation that occurred as the first generations of creole slaves--who worked alongside their owners, free blacks, and indentured whites--gave way to the plantation generations, whose back-breaking labor was the sole engine of their society and whose physical and linguistic isolation sustained African traditions on American soil. As the nature of the slaves' labor changed with place and time, so did the relationship between slave and master, and between slave and society. In this fresh and vivid interpretation, Berlin demonstrates that the meaning of slavery and of race itself was continually renegotiated and redefined, as the nation lurched toward political and economic independence and grappled with the Enlightenment ideals that had inspired its birth.