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Stowe's powerful abolitionist novel fueled the fire of the human rights debate in 1852. Denouncing the institution of slavery in dramatic terms, the incendiary novel quickly draws the reader into the world of slaves and their masters.
Stowe's characters are powerfully and humanly realized in Uncle Tom, a majestic and heroic slave whose faith and dignity are never corrupted; Eliza and her husband, George, who elude slave catchers and eventually flee...
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Orphaned while onboard ship from Ireland, seven-year-old Lavinia arrives on the steps of a tobacco plantation where she is to live and work with the slaves of the kitchen house. Under the care of Belle, the master's illegitimate daughter, Lavinia becomes deeply bonded to her adopted family, though she is set apart from them by her white skin. Eventually, Lavinia is accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress...
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Up from Slavery is the 1901 autobiography of Booker T. Washington detailing his personal experiences in working to rise from the position of a slave child during the Civil War, to the difficulties and obstacles he overcame to get an education at the new Hampton University, to his work establishing vocational schools—most notably the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama—to help black people and other disadvantaged minorities learn useful, marketable skills...
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In a landmark work of deep scholarship and insight, Foner gives us a life of Lincoln as it intertwined with slavery, the defining issue of the time and the tragic hallmark of American history. The author demonstrates how Lincoln navigated a dynamic political landscape deftly, moving in measured steps, often on a path forged by abolitionists and radicals in his party, and that Lincoln's greatness lay in his capacity for moral and political growth....
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"From Percival Everett-a recipient of the NBCC Lifetime Achievement Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Booker Prize, and numerous PEN awards-comes James, a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby...
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""It is staggering that there is no date commemorating the end of slavery in the United States." -Annette Gordon-Reed. The essential, sweeping story of Juneteenth's integral importance to American history, as told by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Texas native. Interweaving American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed, the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas in the 1850s, recounts...
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Filled with adventure and humor, Mark Twain's classic novel vividly recreates the world he knew and loved from his years as a Mississippi riverboat captain. Young Huckleberry Finn is one of Twain's greatest creations and one of the most enduring characters in all American literature. He has no mother, and his father is usually drunk, often violent, and almost always vagrant. Huck must live by his wiles, his wits and at times, by petty thievery. But...
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Perhaps the most powerful and influential black American of his time, Frederick Douglass, embodied the tumultuous social changes that transformed the United States during the nineteenth century. In a career of unprecedented breadth, Douglass rose from the oppression of his slave's birth to fame as an abolitionist
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The story of Solomon Northup is a bizarre and incredible one. Born a free black in New York State in 1808, he was kidnapped in Washington, D.C., in 1841, and spent most of the next 12 years as a slave on a Louisiana cotton plantation. His years in this condition of servitude were filled with abuse, apprehension, and a profound fear for his life (he narrowly escaped lynching). Northup's years in captivity are dramatically recounted here, as are his...
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Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) is a historical novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Although her career peaked with the publication of abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Stowe continued to work as a professional writer throughout her life. A tale of greed, betrayal, and rebellion, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp displays her impressive imaginative range and admirable moral outlook while illuminating aspects of early American...
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"In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis, the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few precious items as a token of love and to try to ensure Ashley's survival. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the bag in spare yet haunting language--including Rose's wish...
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The story follows Hetty 'Handful' Grimk�e, a Charleston slave, and Sarah, the daughter of the wealthy Grimk�e family. The novel begins on Sarah's eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership over Handful, who is to be her handmaid. "The Invention of Wings" follows the next thirty-five years of their lives.
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"Using Olaudah Equiano's autobiography as the source, the text shares Equiano's life story in found verse. Readers will follow his story from his childhood in Africa, enslavement at a young age, liberation, and life as a free man"--
"Millions of Africans were enslaved during the transatlantic slave trade, but few recorded their personal experiences. Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano is perhaps the most well...
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Presents the remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise, with Ellen passing as a wealthy, disabled white man and William posing as "his" slave.
In December 1848, a young enslaved couple named Ellen and William Craft traveled openly by rail, coach and steamship from Macon, Georgia, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ellen, who passed for white, disguised herself as a wealthy disabled...
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"Born into a life of slavery, Ona Judge eventually grew up to be George and Martha Washington's "favored" dower slave. When she was told that she was going to be given as a wedding gift to Martha Washington's granddaughter, Ona made the bold and brave decision to flee to the north, where she would be a fugitive. From her childhood, to her time with the Washingtons and living in the slave quarters, to her escape to New Hampshire, [this book] is an...
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Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway,...
19) Finn : a novel
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A novel inspired by Mark Twain's classic tales explores the mysterious life and strange death of Huckleberry Finn's infamous father, describing Finn's fearsome father, the Judge; his brother, the sickly, sycophantic Will, and the young Huck.
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The day nine-year-old Grace is called to work in the kitchen in the Big House, everyone warns her to keep her head down and her thoughts to herself, but the more she sees of the oppressive Master and his hateful wife, the more she questions things until one day her thoughts escape--and to avoid being separated she and her family flee into the Dismal Swamp, to join the other escaped slaves who live there.
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