Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in this book, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of thousands of natives who were kidnapped and enslaved by the conquistadors, then forced to descend into the "mouth of hell" of eighteenth-century silver mines or, later, made to serve as domestics for Mormon...

Slavery was introduced to North America in the sixteenth century, as Spanish and Portuguese settlers relied on slave labor to extract the resources of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Brazil, and other colonies. When the British established North American colonies in the early seventeenth century, slavery gradually became prevalent. This book will examine how slaves were treated in colonial America, and how laws and attitudes about the institution of slavery...

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave...

Slavery in the South has been documented in volumes ranging from exhaustive histories to bestselling novels. But the North's profit from---indeed, dependence on---slavery has mostly been a shameful and well-kept secret ... until now. In this startling and superbly researched new book, three veteran New England journalists demythologize the region of America known for tolerance and liberation, revealing a place where thousands of people were held in...

"Joining the ranks of Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Zora Neale Hurston's rediscovered classic Barracoon, an immersive and revelatory history of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on US soil, told through the stories of its survivors-the last documented survivors of any slave ship-whose lives diverged and intersected in profound ways"--

A four-hundred-year history of the African-American experience traces four pivotal migrations, including the violent relocation of one million slaves to the antebellum South and the movement of millions to industrial cities a century later.