Some Very Good Books on a Very Wide Variety of Topics

 

Aron, Steven  How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (2009)

Reveals how the westward expansion of southern slavery meant the displacement and eradication of Native Americans

 

Alexander, Michelle The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness (2012)

Documents how the racist legacies of plantation slavery corrupt law, undermine justice, and exploit people of color today throughout today’s prison systems.

 

Bales, Kevin Disposable People: The New Slavery and the Global Economy  (2004)

The “go to” introduction to what the “new slavery” is and how it works across the globe

 

Ball, Erica  To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politics and the Antebellum  Black Middle Class (2012)

A revealing analysis of why and how free African Americans mobilized against slavery in the antebellum South and racism in the (nominally) free antebellum North

 

Barnes, L. Diane, Frederick Douglass: Reformer and Statesman (2013)

An outstanding brief biography this preeminent black abolitionist

 

Berlin, Ira, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1992)

A rich account of slavery’s development before the during the 17^th and 18^th centuries, before the rise of the South’s “cotton kingdom”

 

Blackmon, Douglas, Slavery By Another Name: The Reenslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to W.W.II (2008)

A Pulitzer Prize account of how slavery survived the Civil War by capturing the Southern prison system and by subjecting black farmers to debt peonage. The 13^th Amendment did not succeed in abolishing slavery.

 

Childs, Dennis, Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain
Gang to the Penitentiary (2015)

A forceful and convincing examination of the evolution of post-1865 re-enslavement of African Americans and other people of color from chain gangs and prison farms to today’s prison industrial complex.

Cimbala, Paul and Miller, Randall (eds.), The Great Task Remaining Before Us: Reconstruction as America’s Continuing Civil War (2010)

Original essays that illuminate the many divisive legacies of slavery that emerged in the aftermath of emancipation

 

Craig, Gary Child Slavery Now: A Contemporary Reader (2010)

A comprehensive collection of original essays by an exceptional group of authors on many aspects of contemporary child slavery in many parts of the world.

 

Daniels, Pete, In the Shadow of Slavery: Debt Peonage in the Old South

Documents in compelling detail the post-Civil War re-enslavement of African American farm families through debt peonage systems that persisted until the end of W.W. II

 

Davis, David Brion, Slavery and Human Progress (1998)

Illuminates how slavery systems and movements to abolish them developed their conflicting moral justifications during the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

 

DeStefano, Anthony M. The War on Human Trafficking: U.S. Policy Assessed (2008)

A brief but comprehensive account of recent US Government policies to combat slavery and trafficking and the ongoing controversies these policies have generated (2009)

 

Drescher, Seymour, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (2009)

The most comprehensive account available of the rise and fall of global slavery in the 18^th and 19^th centuries and its reappearance in the 20^th as massive systems of coerced labor

 

Fagan-Yellin, Jean, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (2008)

An extraordinary biography of an extraordinary black abolitionist and former slave, Harriet Jacobs, accompanied by Jacob’s autobiography, an antislavery classic.

 

Horton, Lois and Horton, James O., In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1750-1860

The definitive history of free northern Black Americans’ resistance to slavery, segregation and white supremacist ideology before the Civil war

 

Kara, Siddarth, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (2010)

Kara, Siddarth, Bonded labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia (2012)

Two deeply researched economic analyses that employ empirical data to develop detailed explanations of slavery in all its forms throughout South Asia

Leflouria, Talitha, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (2015)

Vividly reconstructs and persuasively interprets the lives of African American women being exploited by and resisting the “slavery by another name” that developed in the post-Civil War South

McDaniel, Caleb, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery (2013)

Reveals the vitality of abolitionists’ ideas and actions in nourishing democratic values in the age of transatlantic slavery

 

Malarek, Victor , The Johns: Sex for Sale and The Men who Buy it (NY: Arcade, 2009)

Malarek, Victor , The Natashas

 

Murphy, Laura T. , Survivors of Slavery: Modern-Day Slave Narratives (2014)

Laura Murphy offers close to forty survivor narratives from Cambodia, Ghana, Lebanon, Macedonia, Mexico, Russia, Thailand, Ukraine, and the United States, detailing the horrors of a system that forces people to work without pay and against their will, under the threat of violence, with little or no means of escape. Representing a variety of circumstances in diverse contexts, these survivors are the Frederick Douglasses, Sojourner Truths, and Olaudah Equianos of our time, testifying to the widespread existence of a human rights tragedy and the urgent need to address it.