"American historians began producing in-depth studies of slavery and slave life shortly after World War II, but it was not until the early 1980s that the country's museums took the first tentative steps to interpret those same controversial topics. Perhaps because of the tremendous amount of primary material related to George Washington, almost no one looked into the lives of Mount Vernon's enslaved population. Incorporating the results of detailed...

"When he was eleven years old, George Washington inherited ten human beings. The life of the first president has been well chronicled, but the lives of the people of color he owned--the people who sustained his plantation and were buried in unmarked graves there--have not. Using fascinating primary source material and photographs of historical artifacts, author Carla Killough McClafferty sheds light on the lives of several of the men and women enslaved...