Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

The Middle Passage: White Ships/ Black Cargo

by Tom Feelings

Alex Haley's Roots awakened many Americans to the cruelty of slavery. The Middle Passage focuses attention on the torturous journey which brought slaves from Africa to the Americas, allowing readers to bear witness to the sufferings of an entire people. 64 paintings.

Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

by David W. Blight

No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America's collective memory as the Civil War. In the war's aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America's national reunion. In 1865, confronted with a ravaged landscape and a torn America, the North and South... (more)

David Walker's Appeal: To the Coloured Citizens of the World

David Walker's Appeal: To the Coloured Citizens of the World

by David Walker

David Walker's Appeal is a landmark work of American history and letters, the most radical piece of writing by an African American in the nineteenth century. Startling in its intensity, unrelenting in its attacks on slavery and white racism, it alarmed Southern slaveholders, inspired Northern abolitionists, and hastened the sectional conflicts that led to the Civil War. In this new edition of the Appeal , the... (more)

The People Could Fly: The Picture Book

by Virginia Hamilton

“THE PEOPLE COULD FLY,” the title story in Virginia Hamilton’s prize-winning American Black folktale collection, is a fantasy tale of the slaves who possessed the ancient magic words that enabled them to literally fly away to freedom. And it is a moving tale of those who did not have the opportunity to “fly” away, who remained slaves with only their imaginations to set them free as they told and retold this tale. ... (more)

Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History

Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History

by Thomas Norman DeWolf

In 2001, at forty-seven, Thomas DeWolf was astounded to discover that he was related to the most successful slave-trading family in American history, responsible for transporting at least 10,000 Africans to the Americas. His infamous ancestor, U.S. senator James DeWolf of Bristol, Rhode Island, curried favor with President Thomas Jefferson to continue in the trade after it was outlawed. When James DeWolf died in... (more)

The Wagon

by Tony Johnston, James Ransome

One Carolina morning a child is born into slavery. He grows and is soon working for the Master from dawn to dark. And as he grows, he dreams that the wagon he's helped build for Master is a glorious chariot of freedom. "Ransome's paintings give life to the characters and bring out the luster of the surroundings; the story is ardent and somber, a piercing lament."--Kirkus Reviews. "Gnarled, emotive oil paintings... (more)

In Search of the Promised Land: A Slave Family in the Old South (New Narratives in American History) (New Narratives in American History)

In Search of the Promised Land: A Slave Family in the Old South (New Narratives in American History) (New Narratives in American History)

by John Hope Franklin

The matriarch of a remarkable African American family, Sally Thomas went from being a slave on a tobacco plantation to a "virtually free" slave who ran her own business and purchased one of her sons out of bondage. In Search of the Promised Land offers a vivid portrait of the extended Thomas-Rapier family and of slave life before the Civil War. Based on personal letters and an autobiography by one of Thomas'... (more)

Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the DIlemma of Black Patriotism

Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the DIlemma of Black Patriotism

by Roger W. Wilkins

An outspoken participant in the civil rights movement, Roger Wilkins served as Assistant Attorney General during the Johnson administration. In 1972 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize along with Bernstein and Herblock for his coverage of Watergate. Yet this black man, who has served the United States so well, feels at times an unwelcome guest here. In Jefferson's Pillow, Wilkins returns to America's beginnings... (more)

Slavery: History and Historians

by Peter J. Parish

A concise, thoughtful study and analysis of American Negro slavery. "One could hardly imagine a more fair-minded, judicious evaluation of such a hotly contested subject."-- Washington Post

Nowhere Is a Place

by Bernice L. McFadden

Bernice L. McFadden, whom the novelist Adriana Trigiani calls "a master storyteller," has crafted a touching novel about a young woman uncovering a surprising family history. Her spectacular debut novel, Sugar , established Bernice L. McFadden as a writer to watch in African-American literary fiction. In Nowhere Is a Place , she spins a fully realized and memorable portrait of a young woman on a... (more)

Behind the Scenes: Formerly a Slave, but More Recently Modiste, and Friend to Mrs. Lincoln; Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (The Lakeside Classics)

Behind the Scenes: Formerly a Slave, but More Recently Modiste, and Friend to Mrs. Lincoln; Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (The Lakeside Classics)

by Frances Smith Foster, Elizabeth Keckley

Originally published in 1868—when it was attacked as an "indecent book" authored by a "traitorous eavesdropper"— Behind the Scenes is the story of Elizabeth Keckley, who began her life as a slave and became a privileged witness to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Keckley bought her freedom at the age of thirty-seven and set up a successful dressmaking business in Washington, D.C. She became modiste to... (more)

Root and Branch : African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863

Root and Branch : African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863

by Graham Russell Hodges

In this remarkable book, Graham Hodges presents a comprehensive history of African Americans in New York City and its rural environs from the arrival of the first African—a sailor marooned on Manhattan Island in 1613—to the bloody Draft Riots of 1863. Throughout, he explores the intertwined themes of freedom and servitude, city and countryside, and work, religion, and resistance that shaped black life in the... (more)

Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence and Resistance Ethics

Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence and Resistance Ethics

by Traci C. West

In Wounds of the Spirit , Traci West employs first person accounts-from slave narratives to contemporary interviews to Tina Turner's autobiography-to document a historical legacy of violence against black women in the United States. West, a black feminist Christian ethicist, situates spiritual matters within a discussion of the psycho-social impact of intimate assault against African American women. Distinctive... (more)

Forty Acres and Maybe a Mule (Jean Karl Books)

Forty Acres and Maybe a Mule (Jean Karl Books)

by Harriette Robinet

Winner of the 1999 Scott O'Dell Award A Notable Children's Book in the Field of Social Studies Maybe nobody gave freedom, and nobody could take it away like they could take away a family farm. Maybe freedom was something you claimed for yourself. Like other ex-slaves, Pascal and his older brother Gideon have been promised forty acres and maybe a mule. With the family of friends they have built along the... (more)

Should America Pay?: Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations

Should America Pay?: Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations

by Raymond Winbush

Growing interest in reparations for African Americans has prompted a range of responses, from lawsuits against major American corporations and a march in Washington to an anti-reparations ad campaign. As a result, the historical link between slavery and contemporary race relations is more potent and obvious than ever. Lawmakers, distinguished academics, and grassroots organizers have embraced the idea that... (more)

A Far Cry from Freedom: Gradual Abolition 1799-1827: New York State's Crime Against Humanity

A Far Cry from Freedom: Gradual Abolition 1799-1827: New York State's Crime Against Humanity

by L. Lloyd Stewart

The comparison of degrees of enslavement, that is whether the institutional subjugation of one race of people by another is more or less severe in one country or another or one region of a country or another, is not the designed purpose of this book. For the life-style of the Africans and their descendants enslaved in New York State prior to the mid-nineteenth century can best be described as analogous in its... (more)

The Hemingses of Monticello

An American Family

by Annette Gordon-Reed

Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize: “<A> commanding and important book.”—Jill Lepore, The New Yorker This epic work—named a best book of the year by the Washington Post , Time , the Los Angeles Times , Amazon, the San Francisco Chronicle , and a notable book by the New York Times —tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been... (more)

Mississippi to Africa: A Journey of Discovery

Mississippi to Africa: A Journey of Discovery

by Melvin J. Collier

Mississippi to Africa captures Collier's fourteen-year journey in excavating the buried history of his maternal grandmother's family-a journey that took him back seven generations, from northern Mississippi to the Piedmont hills of South Carolina, and even back to a specific people and region in West Africa where his ancestry undoubtedly began. Trekking the paths of his ancestors and their displaced relatives... (more)

Killing the Black Body : Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

Killing the Black Body : Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

by Dorothy E. Roberts

This is a no-holds-barred response to the liberal and conservative retreat from an assertive, activist, and socially transformative civil rights agenda of recent years--using a black feminist lens and the issue of the impact of recent legislation, social policy, and welfare "reform" on black women's--especially poor black women's--control over their bodies' autonomy and their freedom to bear and raise children... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: slavery and race