Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup is a 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.

An international bestseller that sold more than 300,000 copies when it first appeared in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin was dismissed by some as abolitionist propaganda; yet Tolstoy deemed it a great work of literature "flowing from love of God and man." Today, however, Harriet Beecher Stowe's stirring indictment of slavery is often confused with garish dramatizations that flourished for decades after the Civil War: productions that relied heavily on melodramatic...

Lights of Lowell Book 3- When tragedy strikes, Jasmine Houston must uproot her family from the Northern mill town of Lowell and take over her family's Southern plantation, The Willows. But upon her arrival, her anti-slavery positions cause strife between Jasmine and her neighbors and relatives. Tensions continue to rise until an explosive act--the burning of The Willows--causes Jasmine and Nolan to flee north. But the lives of the slaves they've promised...

Caroline Wimbley Levine never expected to assume the role of her late mother, a force of nature who ruled Tall Pines Plantation in South Carolina's Lowcountry, but with her son taking up with an older single mom, her sister-in-law indulging in alcoholic binges, her brother in love with another woman, and her nieces behaving like heathens, she knows someone has to take control.

From Edward P. Jones comes one of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory-winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. The Known World tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline....

In her final novel, Willa Cather departed from her usual Great Plains settings to plumb the turbulent relationships between slaves and their owners in the antebellum South.

Sapphira and the Slave Girl is set in Virginia just before the Civil War. Sapphira is a slave owner who feels she has come down in the world and channels her resentments into jealousy of her beautiful mulatto slave, Nancy. Sapphira’s daughter Rachel,

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"Jamie Pyke, son of the master of Tall Oaks plantation and his kitchen slave, is passing as a wealthy white aristocrat in Philadelphia. His secret identity is threatened, putting his life in grave danger, when he is compelled by a promise to travel back to the South to rescue a beloved boy servant named Pan who has been kidnapped and sold into slavery. The innocent child seems unlikely to survive life in the quarters, but he finds an ally in the compassionate...

“My Bondage and My Freedom”, by Frederick Douglass. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from today’s top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events • Footnotes and endnotes • Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired...

Heather Graham's Old Florida series comes to a close with a star-crossed affair between a Northern soldier and a Southern belle Bravery in war can take many forms. There is the bravery of sacrifice for your country, and of attacking in the face of an opposing army, but there is also the bravery of risking your life to help others. And that is just what Tia McKenzie does for the rebel cause. She sneaks into the North and escorts rebel soldiers back...