Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes* is an exceptional work about an exceptional woman that manages to put the spotlight on a little known historical document (the titular Book of Negroes).

Spanning sixty or so years, from the mid 1700s to early 1800s, The Book of Negroes is about Aminata Diallis, a woman who as a child is kidnapped from her ( Read more... )

1. Nat Turner by Kyle Baker (New York: Abrams, 2008)On August 21, 1831, Nat Turner led more than seventy rebels in what would become the largest slave uprising in U.S. history. He was subsequently captured, tried and hanged, but his conversations with his lawyer became the basis for a document titled "The Confessions of Nat Turner," which artist ( Read more... )

Content warning: The book depicts rape, beatings, and female genital cutting, but they're not discussed in this post.This is the story of Mende Nazer, who was abducted from her home in Sudan in 1993 and sold into slavery. Throughout her teenage years she was forced to do domestic work for a wealthy family, before being sent to work for her "master ( Read more... )

38.The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead ( Read more... )

3. Dolen Perkins-Valdez, WenchWhew, this is a depressing book. But well worth reading; the characters are all very believable and engaging, and the situation is compelling. It's a novel, but one based on a real-life situation: Tawawa House, a popular summer resort in the early and middle 1800s, located in Ohio but frequented by rich men from ( Read more... )

These two articles are available for free online here at Project Gutenberg. They are "My Escape From Slavery" and "Reconstruction ( Read more... )

This is a young adult novel, fiction set in the real town of Buxton, Canada, a settlement of runaway slaves. Elijah is the first child born into freedom in Buxton. The book starts with him telling about his ordinary life of school, chores, fishing, and getting in trouble with his friends. As the story progresses it keeps its sense of humour but ( Read more... )

39. Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, Black London: Life Before Emancipation

This was a great book, but not quite as great as I wanted it to be. An academic work as readable as any pop non-fiction book, Black London deals with the historical presence of black people in London throughout history, although the focus is on the 1700s. The author says that ( Read more... )

This is an autobiography by the first president of Tuskegee University (called then Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute), Booker T. Washington. Born to a slave woman in Alabama and an unknown white man, he was emancipated at the end of the Civil War along with the rest of the slaves there, taking the last name of Washington the first time he ( Read more... )

A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid
1988.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

I am a fan of Jamaica Kincaid.  In the last year or so I have read her books At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, and Lucy, and got a lot out of each of them.  I was looking forward to reading A Small Place because I was looking forward to learning more about Antigua, the Caribbean ( Read more... )