"In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North....

This dramatic autobiography of the early life of an American slave was first published in 1845, when its young author had just achieved his freedom. Douglass' eloquence gives a clear indication of the powerful principles that led him to become the first great African-American leader in the United States. The personal account of a fugitive slave's privation and sufferings and his campaigns for Negro emancipation. This dramatic autobiography of the...

Harriet Jacobs was born a slave in the American South and went on to write one of the most extraordinary slave narratives. First published pseudonymously in 1861,Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl describes Jacobs's treatment at the hands of her owners, her eventual escape to the North, and her perilous existence evading recapture as a fugitive slave. To save herself from sexual assault and protect her children she is forced to hide for seven years...

A fictionalized biography of the eighteenth-century African woman who, as a child, was brought to New England to be a slave, and after publishing her first poem when a teenager, gained renown throughout the colonies as an important black American poet.

Journalist Ball confronts the legacy of his family's slave-owning past, uncovering the story of the people, both black and white, who lived and worked on the Balls' South Carolina plantations. It is an unprecedented family record that reveals how the painful legacy of slavery continues to endure in America's collective memory and experience. Ball, a descendant of one of the largest slave-owning families in the South, discovered that his ancestors...

Ellen and William Craft were two of the few slaves to ever escape from the Deep South. Their first escape took them to Philadelphia, then on to Boston pursued by slave hunters, and finally 5000 miles across the ocean to England, where they were able to settle peacefully.

"Michael Beschloss has brought us a saga about crucial times in America's history when a courageous President dramatically changed the future of the United States." "You will be in the room with the private George Washington, braving threats of impeachment and assassination to make peace with England. John Adams, incurring his party's "unrelenting hatred" by refusing to fight France and warning his enemies, "Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war."...

A biography of Sir Francis Drake, focusing on his activities as a pirate and slave trader, which made him a hero in England, but earned him the name of the Dragon by the Spanish.

The story of a young girl, bought as a slave by a Boston family, who learned to write and later became a poet.

Follows the history of slavery from West Africa to America, recounts what daily life was like, and describes the founding of the Spanish colonies.