This is the forgotten story of the million white Europeans, snatched from their homes and taken in chains to the great slave markets of North Africa to be sold to the highest bidder. Ignored by their own governments, and forced to endure the harshest of conditions, very few lived to tell the tale. Using the firsthand testimony of a Cornish cabin boy named Thomas Pellow, Giles Milton vividly reconstructs a disturbing, little known chapter of history. Pellow was bought by the tyrannical sultan of Morocco who was constructing an imperial pleasure palace of enormous scale and grandeur, built entirely by Christian slave labour. As his personal slave, he would witness first-hand the barbaric splendour of the imperial court, as well as experience the daily terror of a cruel regime. Gripping, immaculately researched, and brilliantly realised, WHITE GOLD reveals an explosive chapter of popular history, told with all the pace and verve of one of our finest historians.

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.

After many years of research, award-winning historian Hugh Thomas portrays, in a balanced account, the complete history of the slave trade. Beginning with the first Portuguese slaving expeditions, Hugh Thomas describes and analyzes the rise of one of the largest and most elaborate maritime and commercial ventures in all of history. Between 1492 and 1870, approximately eleven million black slaves were carried from Africa to the Americas to work on plantations, in mines, or as servants in houses. The Slave Trade is alive with villains and heroes and illuminated by eyewitness accounts. Hugh Thomas's achievement is not only to present a compelling history of the time, but to answer controversial questions as who the traders were, the extent of the profits, and why so many African rulers and peoples willingly collaborated.

Eighteenth-century Jamaica, Britain's largest and most valuable slave-owning colony, relied on a brutal system of slave management to maintain its tenuous social order. Trevor Burnard provides unparalleled insight into Jamaica's vibrant but harsh African and European cultures with a comprehensive examination of the extraordinary diary of plantation owner Thomas Thistlewood. Thistlewood's diary, kept over the course of forty years, describes in graphic detail how white rule over slaves was predicated on the infliction of terror on the bodies and minds of slaves. Thistlewood treated his slaves cruelly even while he relied on them for his livelihood. Along with careful notes on sugar production, Thistlewood maintained detailed records of a sexual life that fully expressed the society's rampant sexual exploitation of slaves. In Burnard's hands, Thistlewood's diary reveals a great deal not only about the man and his slaves but also about the structure and enforcement of power, changing understandings of human rights and freedom, and connections among social class, race, and gender, as well as sex and sexuality, in the plantation system.

In the nineteenth century Uncle Tom's Cabin sold more copies than any other book in the world except the Bible.

From the creator of Veronica Mars comes a timely novel that looks at a high school fundraising tradition of auctioning off students as “slaves.” At Robert E. Lee High School, the traditional fundraising event is Slave Day, in which the student leaders and faculty are auctioned off as slaves for the winning bidders. Keene Davenport is outraged and plans to stay home to protest this racist practice. But his mom won’t let him skip school, and he finds that none of his classmates took his protest seriously. So instead he decides on an alternative path of civil disobedience—he will “buy” Shawn Greeley, the school’s first black student body president. Told in eight alternating perspectives, Slave Day is a powerful novel featuring beauty queens, geeks, class clowns, and football players—and none of them will come out of it the same.

The newly freed slaves had almost nothing--no money, no education, and no strong social institutions, including marriage which had often been prohibited, rarely supported by slaveholders. Discrimination was rampant and government was often the worst discriminator. Yet, somehow, they triumphed. They built marriages that were actually slightly more stable than those of white families. The newly free went from virtually zero literacy to at least 50% literacy in a generation. They worked incredibly hard and increased their income about one third faster than white workers. The newly free, anchored in their strong faith, were amazingly forgiving and optimistic. Economics Professor Thomas Tacker tells their inspiring story in a lively, non-technical style. Along the way Professor Tacker demolishes the myths that were told to justify slavery and racism. This is the exciting saga of the spectacularly successful, such as George Washington Carver and Madam C.J. Walker, but also of typical families, every-day champions. In the end, these newly free people overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles and emerged as heroes and heroines. They were, indeed, our other greatest generation.

In the tradition of Arianna Franklin and C. J. Sansom comes Samuel Thomas's remarkable debut, The Midwife's Tale It is 1644, and Parliament's armies have risen against the King and laid siege to the city of York. Even as the city suffers at the rebels' hands, midwife Bridget Hodgson becomes embroiled in a different sort of rebellion. One of Bridget's friends, Esther Cooper, has been convicted of murdering her husband and sentenced to be burnt alive. Convinced that her friend is innocent, Bridget sets out to find the real killer. Bridget joins forces with Martha Hawkins, a servant who's far more skilled with a knife than any respectable woman ought to be. To save Esther from the stake, they must dodge rebel artillery, confront a murderous figure from Martha's past, and capture a brutal killer who will stop at nothing to cover his tracks. The investigation takes Bridget and Martha from the homes of the city's most powerful families to the alleyways of its poorest neighborhoods. As they delve into the life of Esther's murdered husband, they discover that his ostentatious Puritanism hid a deeply sinister secret life, and that far too often tyranny and treason go hand in hand.

"Slave Graves is novel for readers interested in American slavery. Maryland history, archeology, forensic crime analysis, the Vietnam War and the Civil War, and early American shipbuilding. The book is a fascinating mystery about the dig for a shipwreck di"

The story of the longest and most complex legal challenge to slavery in American history For over seventy years and five generations, the enslaved families of Prince George’s County, Maryland, filed hundreds of suits for their freedom against a powerful circle of slaveholders, taking their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. Between 1787 and 1861, these lawsuits challenged the legitimacy of slavery in American law and put slavery on trial in the nation’s capital. Piecing together evidence once dismissed in court and buried in the archives, William Thomas tells an intricate and intensely human story of the enslaved families (the Butlers, Queens, Mahoneys, and others), their lawyers (among them a young Francis Scott Key), and the slaveholders who fought to defend slavery, beginning with the Jesuit priests who held some of the largest plantations in the nation and founded a college at Georgetown. A Question of Freedom asks us to reckon with the moral problem of slavery and its legacies in the present day.