Frank Carlson Library

The life of the woman who, although a slave, gained renown throughout the colonies as the first important black American poet.

When their owner dies at the start of the Revolution, Isabel and her younger sister are sold to Loyalists in New York, where Isabel is offered the chance to spy for the Patriots.

Josiah Henson was born into slavery in La Plata, Maryland, and auctioned off as a child to pay his owner's debt. After numerous trials and abuse, he earned the trust of his slaveholder by exhibiting intelligence and skill. Daringly, he escaped to Canada with his wife and children. There he established a settlement and school for fugitives and repeatedly returned to the United States to help lead others to freedom along the Underground Railroad. He...

Keen to learn but short on time? Get to grips with the life of Abraham Lincoln in next to no time with this concise guide. 50Minutes.com provides a clear and engaging analysis of Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, is undoubtedly one of the most celebrated figures in US history. His time as president is often overshadowed by the fact that it was his election that triggered the American Civil War and the secession...

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 twentieth 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...

How is the state produced? In what ways did enslaved African Americans shape modern governing practices? Ryan A. Quintana provocatively answers these questions by focusing on the everyday production of South Carolina's state space-its roads and canals, borders and boundaries, public buildings and military fortifications. Beginning in the early eighteenth century and moving through the post–War of 1812 internal improvements boom, Quintana highlights...

As students of the Civil War have long known, emancipation was not merely a product of Lincoln's proclamation or of Confederate defeat in April 1865. It was a process that required more than legal or military action. With enslaved people fully engaged as actors, emancipation necessitated a fundamental reordering of a way of life whose implications stretched well beyond the former slave states. Slavery did not die quietly or quickly, nor did freedom...

The cultural memory of plantations in the Old South has long been clouded by myth. A recent reckoning with the centrality of slavery to the US national story, however, has shifted the meaning of these sites. Plantations are no longer simply seen as places of beauty and grandiose hospitality; their reality as spaces of enslavement, exploitation, and violence is increasingly at the forefront of our scholarly and public narratives. Yet even this reckoning...

A novel that spans one hundred years and is set in Virginia during the Civil War and a century beyond explores the brutal legacy of violence and exploitation in American society as it examines the fates of the inhabitants of Beauvais Plantation and their descendants. When war arrives, the master of Beauvais Plantation, Anthony Levallois, foresees that dominion in a new America will be measured not in acres of tobacco under cultivation by his slaves,...

The everyday lives of enslaved people were, filled with the backbreaking tasks that their enslavers forced them to complete. But, in spare moments, they found time in which to earn money and obtain goods for themselves. Enslaved people led vibrant economic lives, cultivating produce and raising livestock to trade and sell. They exchanged goods with non-slaveholding whites and even sold products to their enslavers. Did these pursuits represent a modicum...