Frank Carlson Library

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave...

A landmark history — the sweeping story of the enslavement of tens of thousands of Indians across America, from the time of the conquistadors up to the early 20th century Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in his myth-shattering The Other Slavery, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of...

"From the author of 1491--the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas--a deeply engaging new history that explores the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs. More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed totally different suites of plants and animals. Columbus's voyages brought them back together--and marked the beginning...

Tells the story of the remarkable life of the British abolitionist William Wilberforce, and his extraordinary role as a human rights activist, cultural reformer, and member of Parliament. At the center of this heroic life was a passionate twenty-year fight to abolish the British slave trade, a battle Wilberforce won in 1807, as well as efforts to abolish slavery itself in the British colonies, a victory achieved just three days before his death in...

Bad luck continues to follow Tom Tin and his mates as they find themselves aboard a formerly abandoned ship, are taught to be sailors by two black-hearted castaways they rescue, and sail to a Caribbean island where they make important new friends and enemies.

Stymied by her unfinished family tree assignment for school, a young girl seeks Grandma's counsel and learns about her ancestors, the consequences of slavery, and the history of Black resistance in the United States.

This documentary tells the story of the revolt aboard the slave ship La Amistad, in which Africans abducted from Sierra Leone in violation of international law took over the ship on which they were held, only to end up in the American court system. They took their case all the way to the Supreme Court, with various abolitionists and former president John Quincy Adams leading the way. Based on court documents and transcripts, letters written by the...

Presents an overview of the development, expansion, consequences, and eventual abolition of the slave trade.

Describes the history and practice of slavery, particularly the African slave trade--its origins, growth, and demise from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries.