Even though Sewing Annie Coats and her son, Gabriel, have managed to buy their freedom, their lives are still marked by constant struggle and sacrifice. Washington's Georgetown neighborhood, where the Coatses operate a tailor's shop and laundry, is supposed to be a "promised land" for former slaves, but it is effectively a frontier town, gritty and dangerous, with no laws protecting black people.The remarkable emotional energy with which the Coatses...

"In 1790, Lavinia, a seven-year-old Irish orphan with no memory of her past, arrives on a tobacco plantation where she is put to work as an indentured servant with the kitchen house slaves. Though she becomes deeply bonded to her new family, Lavinia is also slowly accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. As time passes she finds herself perilously straddling two very different worlds...

Sethe, an escaped slave living in post-Civil War Ohio with her daughter and mother-in-law, is persistently haunted by the ghost of her dead baby girl.

It's 1863, and Thomas and his little sister, Birdie, have fled the farm where they were born and raised as slaves. Following the North Star, looking for freedom, they soon cross paths with a Union soldier. Everything changes: Corporal Henry Green brings Thomas and Birdie back to his regiment, and suddenly it feels like they've found a new home. Best of all, they don't have to find their way north alone -- they're marching with the army. But then orders...

""It is staggering that there is no date commemorating the end of slavery in the United States." -Annette Gordon-Reed. The essential, sweeping story of Juneteenth's integral importance to American history, as told by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Texas native. Interweaving American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed, the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas in the 1850s, recounts...

When an award-winning foreign journalist reveals the existence of an Amsterdam-based "knot shop" that employs and enslaves young girls as laborers, the private security firm Rutherford Risk is hired by a philanthropist to find it and shut it down. David "Sarge" Dulwich, John Knox's former boss, knows that Knox's culture and combat training plus his sympathy for the abused make him right for the job - balanced by Grace Chu's more subtle skills.

A youth who has known only the primitive life of a galaxy slave is purchased by a beggar who turns out to be a man with many extracurricular activities.

"In 1848, Ellen Craft became invisible. Ellen, a slave from Macon, Georgia, took trains and steamboats north, but the people all around couldn't see her. They saw only a white man. Ellen Craft's mother was a slave, but her father was her master, and she had skin as white as his. So she posed as a white man, while her husband William posed as her slave. Ellen vanished, and she became William Johnson - an ailing gentleman seeking medical treatment in...

"The author of the New York Times bestseller and beloved book club favorite The Kitchen House continues the story of Jamie Pyke, son of both a slave and master of Tall Oakes, whose deadly secret compels him to take a treacherous journey through the Underground Railroad. Published in 2010, The Kitchen House became a grassroots bestseller. Fans connected so deeply to the book's characters that the author, Kathleen Grissom, found herself being asked...

A compilation, selected from various sources and arranged chronologically, of the reminiscences of slaves and ex-slaves about their experiences from the leaving of Africa through the Civil War and into the early twentieth century.