A novel based on the life of the author's great-grandmother follows the story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and one of his slaves, through the years of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Jubilee tells the true story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and his black mistress. Vyry bears witness to the South's antebellum opulence and to its brutality, its wartime ruin, and the promises of Reconstruction. Weaving her own family's...

Recounts the journey of Black slaves to freedom via the underground railroad, an extended group of people who helped fugitive slaves in many ways.

More than a decade ago, Mira fled her small, segregated hometown in the south to forget. With every mile she traveled, she distanced herself from her past: from her best friend Celine, mocked by their town as the only white girl with black friends; from her old neighborhood; from the eerie Woodsman plantation rumored to be haunted by the spirits of slaves; from the terrifying memory of a ghost she saw that terrible day when a dare-gone-wrong almost...

"Master of the Mountain," Henry Wiencek's eloquent, persuasive book--based on new information coming from archaeological work at Monticello and on hitherto overlooked or disregarded evidence in Jefferson's papers--opens up a huge, poorly understood dimension of Jefferson's world."--

"Amara has escaped her life as a slave in the Wolf Den, the city's most notorious brothel, but now her survival depends on the affections of her patron: a man she might not know as well as she once thought. At night in the home he bought for her, the house with the golden door, Amara's dreams are haunted by her past. She longs for her sisterhood of friends--the women at the brothel she was forced to leave behind--and worse, finds herself pursued by...

Hailed in 1849 as "a new department in the literature of civilization," the slave narrative forms the foundation of the African American literary tradition. From the late eighteenth-century narratives by Africans who endured the harrowing Middle Passage, through the classic American fugitive slave narratives of the mid-nineteenth century, slave narratives have provided some of the most graphic and damning documentary evidence of the horrors of slavery....

Details the history of the Underground Railroad from the roots of slavery through the post-Emancipation era by focusing on the lives of the participants.

One May night in 1861, three slaves escaped a Confederate camp and rowed across the harbor to the Union line. Frank Baker, James Townsend, and Shepard Mallory didn't know what they would find across the water, but they knew it had to be better than what they left behind. Union General Benjamin Butler considered the men's plight. The Fugitive Slave Act required him to return the runaways to their master. But what if they were declared "contraband...

After the Civil War ends, Addy desperately hopes that her family will be reunited in freedom in Philadelphia, but the future may hold both happiness and heartache.