Documentary History of Slavery in North America - by Willie Lee Rose (Paperback)

About the Book

Intimate as well as comprehensive, the documents--personal accounts, songs, legal documents, diaries, letters, and other written sources--reveal the individual views, goals, and lives of slaves and their masters, making this engaging work one of the most respected catalogs of firsthand information about slavery in North America.

Book Synopsis

Documenting multiple aspects of slavery and its development in North America, this collection provides more than one hundred excerpts from personal accounts, songs, legal documents, diaries, letters, and other written sources. The book assembles a remarkable portrayal of the day-to-day connections between, and among, slaves and their owners across more than two centuries of subjugation and resistance, despair and hope. Beginning with a chronicle of the origins of slavery in the British colonies of North America, the collection traces the growth of the system to the antebellum period and includes accounts of slave revolts, auctions, slave travel and laws, and family life. Intimate as well as comprehensive, the documents reveal the individual views, goals, and lives of slaves and their masters, making this engaging work one of the most respected catalogs of firsthand information about slavery in North America.

Review Quotes

A remarkably intimate picture of the psychic tensions and injuries wrought by the institution.

--Journal of Southern History

Seldom does one find such flashes of erudition prefacing each document, providing the whole with the glow of authority. . . . A scholarly standard for documenting slavery has been set.

--American Historical Review

The best single-volume documentary collection on American slavery.

--Randall M. Miller

About the Author

WILLIE LEE ROSE is the author of Rehearsal for Reconstruction, A Documentary History of Slavery in North America (both Georgia), and Slavery and Freedom. The Willie Lee Rose Prize, sponsored by the Southern Association for Women Historians, was established in her honor. It is awarded annually for the best book on any topic in southern history written by a woman (or women).