Courage Against Cruelty: Life as a Slave in the Americas
The violent struggle for freedom in Haiti, typified by the opening scene in which a woman is crucified for killing her baby so he will not grow up to be a slave, and the rise of a former slave, Toussaint L'Ouverture, to self-proclaimed governor general.
It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who calls herself Beloved.
In this epic, the Chesapeake Bay region gets Michener's novel treatment. From Indians to religious pilgrims, from pirates to slave holders, from Quakers to desperate Irish immigrants, the people come in and make their mark on the windy marshes and tidal basins of the Chesapeake Bay.
Several narratives of African American history, including that of a former slave repatriated to Africa in 1834, another of an elderly woman freed after the Civil War, and a third of a British slave trader.
A group of resolute runaway slaves attempt to steal the gunboat Swanee and deliver it to the Union army and are united in their fight by love and history.
Jacqueline Tobin tells the story African American quilter Ozella Williams handed down to her, describing how slaves made coded quilts and used them to navigate their escape on the Underground Railroad.
Peacock's acclaimed second novel centers on the centuries-old secrets that bind together two families --one white, one black--on an old Southern plantation.
"A fascinating fusion of two literary models of the nineteenth century, the sentimental novel and the slave narrative, Our Nig, apart from its historical significance, is a deeply ironic and highly readable work, tracing the trials and tribulations of Frado, a mulatto girl abandoned by her white mother after the death of the child's black father, who grows up as an indentured servant to a white family in nineteenth-century Massachusetts."
"The monumental bestseller! Alex Haley recaptures his family's history in this drama of eighteenth-century slave Kunta Kinte and his descendants." The family story continues with Haley's Queen.
"The revolt was led by a remarkable Negro preacher named Nat Turner, an educated slave who felt himself divinely ordained to annihilate all the white people in the region.
"The (novel) is narrated by Nat himself as he lingers in jail through the cold autumnal days before his execution. The compelling story ranges over the whole of Nat's Life, reaching its inevitable and shattering climax that bloody day in August."
A fictionalized account of an actual escape in 1843 of a slave and her seven children from a western Virginia tobacco plantation on the Ohio River, and their harrowing flight across Ohio to Canada on the Underground Railroad. This vivid, inspiring chronicle of a family's ordeal is also a compelling history of the Underground Railroad, in which all the major characters and events are real.
