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Hetty "Handful" Grimké, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimké household. The Grimké's daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women. On Sarah's eleventh birthday, she is given ownership of ten year old Handful, who is to be her handmaid. Over...
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"Deeply affecting. . . . Like the best novels of Nadine Gordimer, it makes us appreciate the dynamic between the personal and the political, the public and the private, and the costs and causes of radical belief." — New York Times
A triumph of the imagination and a masterpiece of modern storytelling, Cloudsplitter is narrated by the enigmatic Owen Brown, last surviving son of America's most
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An account of the first great human rights crusade, which originated in England in the 1780s and resulted in the freeing of hundreds of thousands of slaves around the world. In 1787, twelve men gathered in a London printing shop to pursue a seemingly impossible goal: ending slavery in the largest empire on earth. Along the way, they would pioneer most of the tools citizen activists still rely on today, from wall posters and mass mailings to boycotts...
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"No one knows where the term Underground Railroad came from--there were no trains or tracks, only "conductors" who helped escaping slaves to freedom. Including real stories about "passengers" on the "Railroad," this book chronicles slaves' close calls with bounty hunters, exhausting struggles on the road, and what they sacrificed for freedom. With 80 black-and-white illustrations throughout and a sixteen-page black-and-white photo insert, the Underground...
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A deeply entrenched institution, slavery lived on legally and commercially even in the northern states that had abolished it after the American Revolution. Slaves could be found in the streets of New York well after abolition, traveling with owners doing business with the city's major banks, merchants, and manufacturers. New York was also home to the North's largest free black community, making it a magnet for fugitive slaves seeking refuge. Slave...
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"The definitive, dramatic biography of the most important African-American of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era. As a young man Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major...
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In Inhuman Bondage, Davis sums up a lifetime of insight, beginning with the dramatic Amistad case. He looks at slavery in the American South, describing black slaveholding planters; the rise of the Cotton Kingdom; the daily life of ordinary slaves; the highly destructive internal, long-distance slave trade; the sexual exploitation of slaves; the emergence of an African-American culture; and much more. A definitive history by a writer deeply immersed...
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Dedham's Black History Month - Adult
Dedham's Goodreads Choice Awards 2023
NPR: Books We Love 2023
STO: Critics' Choice
Dedham's Goodreads Choice Awards 2023
NPR: Books We Love 2023
STO: Critics' Choice
Description
In December 1848, a young enslaved couple named Ellen and William Craft traveled openly by rail, coach and steamship from Macon, Georgia, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ellen, who passed for white, disguised herself as a wealthy disabled man, with William as "his" slave. Woo follows their journey north, and in joining the abolitionist lecture circuit. When the new Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 put them at risk, they fled from the United States. Their...
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"An outspoken abolitionist, Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in 1818, and after his escape in 1838, he repeatedly risked his own freedom as an antislavery lecturer, writer, and publisher. My Bondage and My Freedom represents ten years of reflection following his legal emancipation in 1846 and his break with his mentor, William Lloyd Garrison. Upon its initial publication in 1855, this book catapulted Douglass into the international spotlight...
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"An unprecedented view of Lincoln's Springfield from the acclaimed and bestselling author of Loving Frank. Nancy Horan, author of the million-copy New York Times bestseller Loving Frank, returns with a sweeping historical novel, which tells the story of Abraham Lincoln's ascendance from rumpled lawyer to U.S. president to the Great Emancipator through the eyes of a young asylum-seeker who arrives in Lincoln's home of Springfield from Madeira, Portugal....
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Coretta Scott King Honor winner Bolden sheds light on new research and interpretations of one of America's most influential African Americans. She focuses on Douglass the man rather than the historical icon. In chronicling his shortcomings and the low points in his life as well as his victories, Bolden creates a portrait of this relentless warrior as a speaker, a once-enslaved abolitionist, but most importantly, as a human being.
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"The story of Frederick Douglass is passionate, harrowing, and inspiring. As a former slave, impassioned abolitionist, gifted writer, newspaper editor, and powerful orator, Douglass was an immense, motivational figure. His early life, filled with physical abuse, deprivation, and tragedy, adds up to a heart-wrenching history. However, he was able to overcome everything that bound a slave to his life and become a leading spokesman for his people. In...
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Americans revere the Constitution even as they argue fiercely over its original toleration of racial slavery. Some historians have charged that slaveholders actually enshrined human bondage at the nation's founding. Sean Wilentz shares the dismay but sees the Constitution and slavery differently. Although the proslavery side won important concessions, he asserts, antislavery impulses also influenced the framers' work. Far from covering up a crime...
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"Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism...
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John Brown is a lightning rod of history. Yet he is poorly understood and most commonly described in stereotypes - as a madman, martyr, or enigma. Not until Patriotic Treason has a biography or history brought him so fully to life, in scintillating prose and moving detail, making his life and legacy-and the staggering sacrifices he made for his ideals-fascinatingly relevant to today's issues of social justice and to defining the line between activism...
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From the late colonial period through the Civil War, slavery developed as the most powerful obstacle to the triumph of liberal values in America. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the ambiguities of the revolutionary generation's accommodation of slavery gave way to a direct and violent conflict between northern liberalism and southern slavery. The character of the antislavery movement -- its relationship to broader discussions of morality,...
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"Kidnapped from Africa as a child, Aminata Diallo is enslaved in South Carolina but escapes during the chaos of the Revolutionary War. In Manhattan she becomes a scribe for the British, recording the names of blacks who have served the King and earned their freedom in Nova Scotia. But the hardship and prejudice of the new colony prompt her to follow her heart back to Africa, then on to London, where she bears witness to the injustices of slavery and...
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