Denmark Vesey's garden

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Anthony S. Parent, Jr

Publisher description: Challenging the generally accepted belief that the introduction of racial slavery to America was an unplanned consequence of a scarce labor market, Anthony Parent, Jr., contends that during a brief period spanning the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries a small but powerful planter class, acting to further its emerging economic interests, intentionally brought racial slavery to Virginia. Parent bases his argument on three historical developments: the expropriation of Powhatan lands, the switch from indentured to slave labor, and the burgeoning tobacco trade. He argues that these were the result of calculated moves on the part of an emerging great planter class seeking to consolidate power through large landholdings and the labor to make them productive. To preserve their economic and social gains, this planter class inscribed racial slavery into law. The ensuing racial and class tensions led elite planters to mythologize their position as gentlemen of pastoral virtue immune to competition and corruption. To further this benevolent image, they implemented a plan to Christianize slaves and thereby render them submissive. According to Parent, by the 1720s the Virginia gentry projected a distinctive cultural ethos that buffered them from their uncertain hold on authority, threatened both by rising imperial control and by black resistance, which exploded in the Chesapeake Rebellion of 1730.

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Robert C.-H. Shell

The Dutch East India Company's introduction of the first slave into the region known as the Cape of Good Hope in 1653 established an institution whose legal status ended in 1838 but whose social and political reverberations are still felt today. Children of Bondage is the story of the social, cultural, and biological progeny of that slave society. Robert Shell examines the complex and highly stratified hierarchies that evolved in South Africa, and outlines how its multiracial system of slavery was distinct from the biracial system that arose in the New World. Shell argues that while frontier and class interests were significant factors in South Africa's history, these influences were secondary manifestations of a more universal force, namely, the family as the fundamental unit of subordination. He explores the history of oceanic and domestic slave trades, sexual and gender relations within the slave hierarchy, religious and ethnic identities among slaves, and the promises and realities of manumission. By viewing the institution of South African slavery from many levels he concludes, "Not only slaves were in bondage; in a profound sense, the owners were as well."

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amer

Children's historical novel. In 1859, when Gilly's father goes to search for gold in the Rocky Mountains, the eleven-year-old is sent to stay with her aunt and uncle in Virginia, where she befriends one of her uncle's slave girls, finds out about the Underground Railroad, and discovers that people are not always exactly as they seem.

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Sanjida O'Connell

Emily Harris, a glamorous young English actress, arrives in America in 1859. There, she meets and falls in love with a charming southern gentleman, Charles Earl Brook. But shortly after they are married, Emily discovers that Charles has kept a terrible secret from her. The Brooks are slave-owners and Emily is forced to travel to the deep south where Charles keeps seven hundred men, women and children in abject poverty. As civil war breaks out, Emily's world becomes increasingly dangerous and she realises that her growing friendship with the slaves could cost her everything she has ever loved.