Readings & Resources
Nonfiction
The Coastwise Traffic
Jervey, Edward D., and C. Harold Huber. “The Creole Affair.” The Journal of Negro History 65, no. 3 (July 1, 1980): 196–211. https://doi.org/10.2307/2717095.
Kerr-Ritchie, Jeffrey R. Rebellious Passage: The Creole Revolt and America’s Coastal Slave Trade. Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Williams, Jennie K. Oceans of Kinfolk: the Coastwise Traffic of Enslaved People in Antebellum America (forthcoming from UNC Press in 2024).
Williams, Jennie K. “Trouble the Water: The Baltimore to New Orleans Coastwise Slave Trade, 1820–1860.” Slavery & Abolition, April 2, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039x.2019.1660509.
Williams, Jennie K. “JHU, Too, Must Atone for Its Slavery Connection.” Baltimore Sun, February 15, 2018. Accessed June 4, 2023. https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/op-ed/bs-ed-op-0216-jhu-donovan-20180214-story.html.
Williams, Jennie K. “Finders Aren’t Keepers: Rethinking and Reconfiguring the Oceans of Kinfolk Database.” Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation 4, no. 3 (2023): 44-61. https://doi.org/10.25971/p79h-e857.
Louisiana & Slavery
Johnson, Jessica M. “Death Rites as Birthrights in Atlantic New Orleans: Kinship and Race in the Case Of María Teresa v. Perine Dauphine.” Slavery & Abolition 36, no. 2 (April 3, 2015): 233–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039x.2014.943931.
Johnson, Jessica M. Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.
Johnson, Rashauna. Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions. Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Harvard University Press, 2001.
Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Africans In Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth-Century. LSU Press, 1995.
Olivarius, Kathryn. Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom. Harvard University Press, 2022.
White, Sophie. Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana. UNC Press Books, 2019.
Slavery & the Family
Glymph, Thavolia. Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Gordon-Reed, Annette. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. W. W. Norton & Company, 2008.
Gutman, Herbert G. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925. Vintage, 1977.
Hunter, Tera W. Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century. Belknap Press, 2017.
Miles, Tiya. All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake. Penguin Random House, 2021.
Heather Andrea Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery. University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
Stevenson, Brenda E. Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South. Oxford University Press, 1997.
Fugitivity & Resistance
Baumgartner, Alice L. South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War. Basic Books, 2020.
Bell, Karen Cook. Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America. Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Camp, Stephanie M. H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Bell, Richard. Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home. 37 Ink, 2020.
Diouf, Sylviane A. Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons. New York University Press, 2014.
Dunbar, Erica Armstrong. Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge. Simon and Schuster, 2017.
Franklin, John Hope, and Loren Schweninger. Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation. Oxford University Press USA, 2000.
Franziska Müller, Viola. Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South. University of North Carolina Press, 2022.
Holden, Vanessa M. Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community. University of Illinois Press, 2021.
Morris, J. Brent. Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp. University of North Carolina Press, 2022.
Nevius, Marcus Peyton. City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763-1856. University of Georgia Press, 2020.
Sayers, Daniel O. A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp, 2016.
Published Primary Sources
Blassingame, John W. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies. LSU Press, 1977.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. The Anti-Slavery Office, 1845.
Northup, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853.
Still, William. The Underground Rail Road: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, &c., Narrating the Hardships, Hair-Breadth Escapes, and Death Struggles of the Slaves in Their Efforts for Freedom, as Related by Themselves and Others Or Witnessed by the Author : Together with Sketches of Some of the Largest Stockholders and Most Liberal Aiders and Advisers of the Road. Philadelphia : Porter & Coates, 1872.
Gender & Slavery
Berry, Daina Ramey, and Leslie M. Harris. Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas. University of Georgia Press, 2018.
Finley, Alexandra J. An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America’s Domestic Slave Trade. University of North Carolina Press, 2020.
Jones-Rogers, Stephanie E. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. Yale University Press, 2020.
McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Morgan, Jennifer L. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Nunley, Tamika Y. At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. University of North Carolina Press, 2021.
Memory, Justice, Redress and Reparations
Araujo, Ana Lucia. Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.
Araujo, Ana Lucia. Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.
Bailey, Anne C. The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Balfour, Lawrie. “Ida B. Wells and ‘Color Line Justice’: Rethinking Reparations in Feminist Terms.” Perspectives on Politics 13, no. 3 (September 1, 2015): 680–96. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1537592715001243.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The Case for Reparations.” The Atlantic, December 15, 2015.
Gordon-Reed, Annette. On Juneteenth. Norton, 2021.
Montpelier Descendants Committee, “Engaging Descendant Communities in the Interpretation of Slavery at Museums and Historic Sites.”
Perry, Imani. South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. HarperCollins, 2022.
Rothman, Adam, and Elsa Barraza Mendoza. Facing Georgetown’s History: A Reader on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation. Georgetown University Press, 2021.
Smith, Clint. How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. Little Brown & Co., 2021.
Slavery & Capitalism
Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Basic Books, 2016.
Beckert, Sven, and Seth Rockman. Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Vintage, 2015.
Berry, Daina Ramey. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. National Geographic Books, 2017.
Morgan, Jennifer L. Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic. Duke University Press, 2021.
Rosenthal, Caitlin. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management. Harvard University Press, 2019.
Rothman, Joshua D. The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America. Basic Books, 2021.
Schermerhorn, Calvin. The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860. Yale University Press, 2015.
Williams, Eric Eustace. Capitalism & Slavery. Trafalgar Square Publishing, 1964.
Data & Digital History
Bouie, Jamelle. “We Still Can’t See Slavery for What It Was.” The New York Times, January 22, 2022. Accessed June 4, 2023.
Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. NYU Press, 2021.
Browne, Simone. “Digital Epidermalization: Race, Identity and Biometrics.” Critical Sociology 36, no. 1 (January 1, 2010): 131–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920509347144.
Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015.
D’Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren F. Klein. Data Feminism. MIT Press, 2020.
Gallon, Kim. “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities.” In University of Minnesota Press EBooks, 42–49, 2016. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1cn6thb.7.
Johnson, Jessica M. “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads.” Social Text 36, no. 4 (December 1, 2018): 57–79.
Klein, Lauren R. “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings.” American Literature 85, no. 4 (December 1, 2013): 661–88. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2367310.
Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity, 2019).
Williams, Jennie K. “Finders Aren’t Keepers: Rethinking and Reconfiguring the Oceans of Kinfolk Database.” Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation 4, no. 3 (2023): 44-61. https://doi.org/10.25971/p79h-e857.
Theory & the Archive
Fuentes, Marisa J. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
hooks, bell. Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. South Bend Press, 1981.
Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. W. W. Norton & Company, 2022.
McKittrick, Katherine. Dear Science and Other Stories. Duke University Press, 2021.
McKittrick, Katherine. “Mathematics Black Life.” Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (June 1, 2014): 16–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2014.11413684.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press (MA), 1995.
Transatlantic Traffic
Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Macmillan, 2008.
Mustakeem, Sowande M. Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage. University of Illinois Press, 2016.
Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship: A Human History. Penguin, 2008.
Smallwood, Stephanie E. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Harvard University Press, 2007.
Fiction & Poetry
Black, Daniel. The Coming: A Novel. St. Martin’s Press, 2015.
Brown, Jericho. The Tradition. Pan Macmillan, 2019.
Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Doubleday, 1979.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. The Water Dancer: a Novel. Penguin Random House, 2020.
Gyasi, Yaa. Homecoming. Penguin Random House, 2016.
Jeffers, Honorée Fanonne. The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois. Harper Collins, 2022.
Llanos-Figueroa, Dahlma. A Woman of Endurance: a Novel. Harper Collins, 2023.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved: A Novel. Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.
Whitehead, Colton, The Underground Railroad. Doubleday, 2016.
Hill, Lawrence. Someone Knows My Name. Norton, 2008.
Johnson, Jocelyn Nicole. My Monticello: Fiction. Henry Holt and Company, 2021.
Johnson, Sadeqa. Yellow Wife: A Novel. Simon & Schuster, 2021.
Philyaw, Deesha. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. Pushkin Press, 2022.
Rosenberg, Lisa Williamson. Embers on the Wind. Little a, 2022.
Saloy, Mona Lisa. Black Creole Chronicles. University of New Orleans Press, 2023.
Saloy, Mona Lisa. Red Beans and Ricely Yours: Poems. Truman State University Press, 2005.
