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"The author of The Kitchen House continues the story of Jamie Pyke, son of both a slave and master of Tall Oakes, whose deadly secret compels him to take a treacherous journey through the Underground Railroad...This...stand-alone novel opens in 1830, and Jamie, who fled from the Virginian plantation he once called home, is passing in Philadelphia society as a wealthy white silversmith. After many years of striving, Jamie has achieved acclaim and security,...

"A groundbreaking historical novel from a heralded author that explores the seldom discussed Puerto Rican Atlantic Slave Trade. At a time when importing humans from Africa had been prohibited by the Spanish Crown, Pola and other slave women provide their master with babies who are immediately taken away and sold on the auction block. Her serial rapes by a number of men are routine and often provided entertainment for the master and his friends. Understandably...

In 1860 Louisiana, eighty-year-old Madame Sylvie decides to sit for a portrait, as horrific stories that span generations from the big house and the fields are revealed.

Memoir of a black man who was born free in New York state but kidnapped, sold into slavery and kept in bondage for 12 years in Louisiana before the American Civil War. He provided details of slave markets in Washington, DC, as well as describing at length cotton cultivation on major plantations in Louisiana.

Born on a plantation but set apart from the others by her mother's position as a medicine woman, a young slave is forced to leave home at eighteen and unexpectedly finds herself in an infamously cruel jail. Born on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia, Pheby Brown was promised her freedom on her eighteenth birthday. Instead she finds herself thrust into the bowels of slavery at the infamous Devil's Half-Acre, a jail where slaves are broken, tortured,...

"Conjure Women is a sweeping story that brings the world of the South before and after the Civil War vividly to life. Spanning eras and generations, it tells of the lives of three unforgettable women: Miss May Belle, a wise healing woman; her precocious and observant daughter Rue, who is reluctant to follow in her mother's footsteps as a midwife; and their master's daughter Varina. The secrets and bonds among these women and their community come to...

"Over the last few decades, and especially in the last ten years, our understanding of slavery has been transformed by the work of countless talented scholars. We have learned a great deal about the lives of enslavers, the struggles and victories of the enslaved, and how the afterlives of American slavery persist into the present. Yet Dan Rood's In the Shadow of the Great House is one of the first books to focus on the engine of slavery, race, and...

When a white servant girl violates the order of plantation society, she unleashes a tragedy that exposes the worst and best in the people she has come to call her family.