Ira Berlin et al., eds., Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Freedom (The New Press, 1998).
This book and tape set presents powerful personal stories about slavery taken from interviews with former slaves conducted in the 1930s as part of the New Deal’s Federal Writers Project. Historians have long drawn on these slave interviews, which cover such topics as relationships between master and slave; survival techniques in the face of hardship; family life, marriage, and childhood under slavery; experiences behind Confederate and Union lines during the Civil War; and, finally, the coming of freedom. The audio recordings include some actual former slaves, whose interviews were recorded during the 1930s with primitive equipment, and some contemporary performers reading from interview transcripts.

Octavia E. Butler, Kindred (Doubleday, 1979).
In this novel, written for young adults, a contemporary African-American woman is pulled back to an early nineteenth-century slave plantation to save the white slave owner who is her ancestor. During her stay in the past, she is forced to assume the role of a slave to survive.

Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave; My Bondage and My Freedom; Life and Times of Frederick Douglass) (Library of America, 1994).
These three autobiographies, collected in a single authoritative edition, were among the most influential books of the nineteenth century. Douglass, who escaped from slavery as a young man, became a leading anti-slavery activist through his lectures and writing. These narratives include firsthand accounts of slavery and abolitionism, John Brown and Abraham Lincoln, Civil War, Reconstruction, and the emerging struggle for civil rights.

Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative Of Olaudah Equiano : Or Gustavus Vassa, The African (Heinemann, 1996).
Olaudah Equiano was born in the region now known as Nigeria, kidnapped and sold into slavery as a child, and brought to the New World where he was owned by a captain in the British Royal Navy and later by a Quaker merchant. Equiano eventually earned the price of his own freedom by careful trading and saving, and went on to become involved in the abolition movement. His bestselling autobiography, originally published in 1789, was the first of what would become many narratives written by former slaves that provided firsthand accounts of the cruelty of the slave system.

Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (Harvard University Press, 1987).
First published in 1861, Incidents is the only pre-Civil War autobiography of a female slave and served as an important source for the making of the Doing As They Can video. Jacobs, writing under the pseudonym Linda Brent, recounts how she hid from and eventually escaped an abusive master only to face the prospect of forcible return to the South when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850. This narrative presents the particular issues facing African-American women and mothers under slavery.

Toni Morrison, Beloved (Knopf, 1987).
Set in Ohio during the Reconstruction era, Beloved tells the harrowing story of Sethe, a former slave, who struggles with the brutally painful legacies of slavery. A dense, complex novel, Beloved conveys the appalling cruelty of slavery through Sethe’s memories and the ghost of a dead child, known only as Beloved.

Solomon B. Northrop, Twelve Years a Slave (Louisiana State University Press, 1968).
Originally published in 1853, Twelve Years a Slave tells the story of Northrop, born a free man in New York, who was kidnapped and sold into southern slavery. This narrative offers descriptions of a slave auction, the cruelties of a Louisiana cotton plantation, and Northrop’s ability to resist his owners within the boundaries of their power over him.

Texbooks/Primary Document Collections

American Social History Project, Freedom’s Unfinished Revolution: An Inquiry into the Civil War and Reconstruction (The New Press, 1996).
Designed for high school students and teachers, Freedom’s Unfinished Revolution begins with the story of resistance to slavery and continues through the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. This textbook was created in close collaboration with a teachers’ advisory committee and combines pre-reading exercises, short narrative sections, large numbers of primary documents and images, and suggestions for classroom activities.

American Social History Project, Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society; Volume One: From Conquest and Colonization Through 1877 (Worth, 2000).
A comprehensive survey of U.S. history that synthesizes the most recent historical scholarship, Who Built America? covers slavery, resistance, struggles for abolition, and the role of free African Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; chapter six covers plantation slavery and resistance in the early nineteenth-century South, while chapter eight details the nation’s growing political conflict over slavery in the 1840s and 1850s.

Freedmen and Southern Society Project, eds., Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (The New Press, 1992).
The triumph and travail of emancipation emerge in the words of the participants--liberated slaves and defeated slaveholders, soldiers and civilians, common folk and aristocrats, Northerners and Southerners. The documents reveal the active role of slaves and former slaves in escaping slavery, aiding the Union cause as laborers and soldiers, transforming the war for the Union into a war against slavery, and giving meaning to their newly won freedom in a nation wracked by warfare and political upheaval.

Milton Meltzer, ed., The Black Americans: A History in Their Own Words, 1619-1983 (reprint ed., Harper Trophy, 1987).
This highly accessible collection of primary sources, created for young adults, includes letters, speeches, newspaper articles, and book excerpts in chronological order. The documents are well-chosen, and each is introduced with a brief and clearly-written headnote.

Deirdre Mullane, ed., Crossing the Danger Water: Three Hundred Years of African-American Writing (Anchor Books, 1993).
This wide-ranging anthology of historical documents and literary texts by African Americans begins with slave narratives and ends with Congressional testimony on the Los Angeles riots. It includes fiction, autobiography, poetry, song lyrics, folktales, court opinions, editorials from early African-American newspapers, and letters by such writers as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright.

Willie Lee Rose, ed., A Documentary History of Slavery in North America (University of Georgia Press, 1999).
This collection provides more than one hundred excerpts from personal accounts, songs, legal documents, diaries, letters, and other written sources. Beginning with the origins of slavery in the British colonies of North America, the documents trace the growth of the system to the antebellum period and chronicle slave revolts, auctions, slave travel and laws, and family life, together creating an intimate portrayal of the day-to-day connections between, and among, slaves and their owners.

Scholarly Works

Herbert Aptheker, ed., American Negro Slave Revolts (International Publishers, 1993; first ed. 1943).
This detailed chronicle of slave rebellions from colonial times to the Civil War effectively disproved the assumption that slaves, because they did not often revolt, were content in bondage. In addition to providing accounts of a number of organized slave revolts that had been buried in the historical record, Aptheker describes the ways that fear of insurrection drove white slave owners to restrict the movement, education, and judicial rights of the enslaved, while also encouraging slaves to adopt a version of Christianity that promoted docile obedience.

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Harvard University Press, 1998).
Many Thousands Gone traces the story of slavery in the original colonies in the years before cotton production predominated, including 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. 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.

Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New Press, 1992; first ed. 1974).
This account describes the lives of free African Americans who lived in southern states in the decades from the revolutionary war era to the eve of the Civil War. Covering their social, political, economic, and legal struggles within a realm severely restricted by racism and the close presence of slavery, this book conveys the complexity of southern race relations and helps to complicate assumptions about slavery, race, and freedom prior to the Civil War.

Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).
This collection of essays covers a range of topics, including the transformation of African-American society (both free and enslaved) during and after the Revolution, the nature of African-American families and churches in the revolutionary era, and the influence of the American Revolution’s republican ideology on the slave system in the new U.S. and the Caribbean. An excellent epilogue by Benjamin Quarles details the circumstances and political aspirations of enslaved and free African Americans during the Revolution and in the years that followed.

Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
In this comprehensive study, Gomez argues that Africans from diverse ethnic backgrounds, upon arriving in America, were dispersed much more closely along ethnic and cultural lines than previously believed, and traces the process (largely complete by 1830) by which enslaved Africans began to see themselves as a different people entirely — part of a homogenous group bound by slavery rather than separated by language or culture in Africa. By scrutinizing sources pertaining to Africa as well as American sources such as runaway-slave advertisements (which often identified slaves by their African ethnicities), ex-slave narratives, stories, music, and even the location and nature of slave rebellions, Gomez pieces together a genealogy of blacks in the American South, attempting to examine their notions of identity and highlight the African influences on contemporary southern culture.

Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1790-1925 (Random House, 1977).
This painstakingly researched and fiercely argued book examines African-American families and their social and cultural adaptations to slavery and emancipation. Written in response to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s infamous 1968 report on The Negro Family in America: The Case for National Action, Gutman proves that slavery, while a cruelly oppressive system, did not destroy the African-American family, and he details the ways that birth patterns, marriage rules, and naming practices established and reinforced kin networks among the enslaved and the newly free.

James Oliver and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (Oxford University Press, 1997).
This book presents the central themes of early American history through the lens of African-American history, synthesizing several decades of scholarship relating to free blacks in the colonial, early national, and antebellum North. The Hortons emphasize the active, complex, and integral role that African Americans played in creating the distinctive "American" culture that emerged in the decades before and after the American Revolution.

Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Harvard University Press, 2000).
Focusing on the largest domestic slave market in the U.S., located in New Orleans, Soul by Soul uses a range of sources to analyze the complex ways that the specific experiences of slave trading embodied the moral tensions at the heart of the slave system. Johnson puts forth a complex argument about how white slave owners enacted their psychological investments in the slave system, and their notion of themselves as beneficent paternalists, through the public transactions of slave sales and purchases, while slaves themselves maneuvered as best they could within the extremely constricted circumstances of a marketplace in which they were the commodity.

Lawrence Levine, Black Culture, Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford University Press, 1976).
While earlier historians assumed that because slaves were by law illiterate, they were thus inarticulate, Levine challenged those assumptions by turning to a previously ignored source of historical evidence. Black Culture, Black Consciousness uses songs, folk tales, and other oral forms (such as "toasts") to explore the contours of slave thought and how emancipation altered the consciousness of the newly free.

Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, A Slave (University of Georgia Press, 1991).
This relatively brief, extremely readable book recounts the gripping and horrifying tale of the teenaged Celia, a slave owned by a respected Missouri farmer, who after years of sexual and physical abuse is put on trial for her master’s murder. McLaurin uses evidence from the trial to tell both Celia’s story and a larger story about race, gender, and power, exploring what he terms "the fundamental moral anxiety" created by the slave system.

Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (W. W. Norton and Company, 1975).
This groundbreaking book probes the tightly intertwined, mutually constitutive development of slavery and republican ideas of equality in the American colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Setting his story in Virginia, Morgan lays out the details of America’s founding paradox–the development and entrenchment of racially-based chattel slavery in a democratic republic–from the first landing of English colonists in Jamestown through Bacon’s Rebellion to the decades preceding the American Revolution. He uses detailed historical evidence and brisk narrative to show how the enslavement of Africans was far from inevitable and was, rather, arrived at through a series of laws and circumstances that altered a labor system of indentured servitude (of contracted poor white Englishmen and women) to one of permanent enslavement (of forced migrants from Africa).

Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South (Oxford University Press, 1980).
This study analyzes the continuity, reinterpretation, and ultimate persistence of African religious traditions among slaves and their descendents in the New World. Raboteau describes the ways that slaves fashioned a Christian tradition to fit their experience of enslavement; the complex ways that Christianity influenced the behavior of the enslaved; and the attitudes of both slaveholding and non-slaveholding whites toward Christianity among the enslaved.

Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (Oxford University Press, 1997).
This book focuses on daily life in Loudon County, Virginia, from 1790 to the eve of the Civil War. Using gender as a primary category of analysis, Stevenson traces the lives of wealthy planters, yeoman farmers, free blacks, Quakers, and slaves, while also providing a broad view of economic, demographic, and social change. She argues that the rise of the domestic slave trade during the early nineteenth century destabilized slave families; she also shows the dehumanizing effects of slavery on white children.

John Kelly Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 1998).
This book places slavery, race relations, and culture formation in the Americas within a broad Atlantic context, emphasizing the autonomous role of Africans in both Africa and the Americas through the seventeenth century. Thornton draws on a wide array of sources in six languages to argue that African elites faced Europeans with some degree of economic and military parity, and that African cultural elements did not wither in the Americas.

Deborah Gray White, Ar'n’t I A Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (revised edition, W.W. Norton and Company, 1999; first ed. 1985).
The first scholarly work to explore the particular situation of enslaved women, Ar'n’t I A Woman refutes common stereotypes about African-American female slaves and delves into female slave networks, family life, reproduction, and the specific and unique difficulties and pressures experienced by enslaved black women.

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