West offers an overview of the lives of enslaved women in America by using a broad chronological perspective, considering themes and issues in their lives from the colonial era through to the end of the Civil War. She compares the lives of enslaved women—sometimes exceptional and sometimes ordinary—across time and space with the lives of enslaved men, and with the white men and women who held them in bondage. West draws upon a wide range...

Starting in the 1870s, Jim Crow laws began to appear across the South. Their aim was to enforce racial segregation, consolidating power in the hands of whites. This book examines the impact of these laws and other challenges that African Americans faced between the Reconstruction period and World War I. Topics discussed include the rise of groups promoting white supremacy, laws designed to quash African-American voting, Plessey v. Ferguson, the success...

In this illuminating text, the origins of the slave trade in Africa and the effects of the practice of slavery on the political and economic history of the United States are explored. King Cotton, the slave hierarchy on southern plantations, the relationship of the slaveholders and slaves, the slave codes that regulated the absolute control of slaves, the ensuing slave rebellions, and the abolitionist movement and those who spoke out against the atrocities...

Away from the bustling nightlife of 1920s Harlem, a literary and cultural rebirth was taking place among African American writers, artists, and performers. Producing works that reflected the racial realities of the era between the end of the Civil War and the beginnings of the civil rights movement, these cultural luminaries helped define a new black consciousness. Readers will learn how the Great Migration and changing opportunities for African Americans...

The experiment at Brook Farm attracted such visitors as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, and Charles A. Dana. In characterizations punctuated with humor, author Lindsay Swift's portrait of "this most romantic incident of New England Transcendentalism" examines the farm's members and customs, and how the farm affected the life of everyone who visited.