Catalog Search Results
Author
Description
"Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage--and lost his mother and all memory of her when he was a child--but he is also gifted with a mysterious power. Hiram almost drowns when he crashes a carriage into a river, but is saved from the depths by a force he doesn't understand, a blue light that lifts him up and lands him a mile away. This strange brush with death forces a new urgency on Hiram's private rebellion. Spurred on by his improvised plantation...
Author
Series
Appears on list
Description
In the most seminal slave narrative ever written, Frederick Douglass writes, "From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom." Reading this narrative is to witness...
3) Homegoing
Author
Appears on these lists
Description
"Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery. Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the...
4) Freewater
Author
Series
Appears on list
Description
After fleeing the plantation where they were enslaved, siblings Ada and Homer discover the secret community of Freewater, and work with freeborn Sanzi to protect their new home from the encroaching dangers of the outside world
5) Oathbringer
Author
Series
Stormlight archive volume 3
Description
Dalinar Kholin's Alethi armies won a fleeting victory at a terrible cost: The enemy Parshendi summoned the violent Everstorm, which now sweeps the world with destruction, and in its passing awakens the once peaceful and subservient parshmen to the horror of their millennia-long enslavement by humans. While on a desperate flight to warn his family of the threat, Kaladin Stormblessed must come to grips with the fact that the newly kindled anger of the...
Appears on these lists
Description
"In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the source of so much that still defines the United States.
The New York Times Magazine’s...
Author
Formats
Description
Perhaps the most powerful and influential black American of his time, Frederick Douglass, embodied the tumultuous social changes that transformed the United States during the nineteenth century. In a career of unprecedented breadth, Douglass rose from the oppression of his slave's birth to fame as an abolitionist.
8) Nightjohn
Author
Series
Formats
Description
Twelve-year-old Sarny's brutal life as a slave becomes even more dangerous when a newly arrived slave offers to teach her how to read.
Author
Appears on these lists
Black History Month 2023
Telling a People's Story: African-American Children's Illustrated Literature
Telling a People's Story: African-American Children's Illustrated Literature
Formats
Description
"Using original slave auction and plantation estate documents, contrasts the monetary value of a slave with the priceless value of life experiences and dreams that a slave owner could never take away"--
10) The last runaway
Author
Pub. Date
2013
Description
In New York Times bestselling author Tracy Chevalier’s newest historical saga, she introduces Honor Bright, a modest English Quaker who moves to Ohio in 1850, only to find herself alienated and alone in a strange land. Sick from the moment she leaves England, and fleeing personal disappointment, she is forced by family tragedy to rely on strangers in a harsh, unfamiliar landscape.
11) The way of kings
Author
Series
Stormlight archive volume 1
Description
A new epic series by the best-selling writer of Robert Jordan's final Wheel of Time novels introduces the world of Roshar through the experiences of a war-weary royal compelled by visions, a highborn youth condemned to military slavery and a woman who would save her impoverished house.
12) A mercy
Author
Appears on these lists
Description
In 1680s Virginia, sixteen-year-old Florens, a slave of Jacob Vaark who was given to the couple eight years earlier and who believes her mother gave her to them so she would not lose her infant son, struggles with issues of abandonment while trying to cope with the uncertainty of colonial life and the people with whom she lives.
Author
Appears on these lists
Description
""A harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American historyBorn a free man in New York, Solomon Northup was abducted in Washington, D.C., in 1841 and spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity as a slave on a Louisiana cotton plantation. After his rescue, he published this exceptionally vivid and detailed account of slave life--perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives. It became an immediate bestseller and today...
14) Show way
Author
Formats
Description
The making of "Show ways," or quilts which once served as secret maps for freedom-seeking slaves, is a tradition passed from mother to daughter in the author's family.
15) Three novels
Author
Series
Library of America volume 4
Pub. Date
[1982]
Description
Tells the stories of a saint-like slave, a religious woman's courtship in eighteenth-century Newport, R.I., and life in a small Massachusetts town
16) The known world
Author
Appears on these lists
Description
Henry Townsend, a African farmer and former slave, is befriended by the most powerful man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County and becomes proprietor of his own plantation, as well as of his own slaves.
Author
Appears on these lists
Black History Month
Black History Month 2023
DAML Black History Month - Youth
Telling a People's Story: African-American Children's Illustrated Literature
Black History Month 2023
DAML Black History Month - Youth
Telling a People's Story: African-American Children's Illustrated Literature
Formats
Description
An simple introduction to African-American history, from Revolutionary-era slavery up to the election of President Obama.
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2021.
Appears on these lists
Black History Month
Black History & Activism: Recommended Reading for MLK Day
DAML Black History Month - Youth
JTL BHM Children
Black History & Activism: Recommended Reading for MLK Day
DAML Black History Month - Youth
JTL BHM Children
Description
"The 1619 Project's lyrical picture book in verse chronicles the consequences of slavery and the history of Black resistance in the United States, thoughtfully rendered by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and Newbery honor-winning author Renée Watson. A young student receives a family tree assignment in school, but she can only trace back three generations. Grandma gathers the whole family, and the student learns that 400 years...
Author
Appears on these lists
Description
In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave...
20) The purchase
Author
Series
Formats
Description
Shunned by his Quaker community for marrying a servant girl, Daniel Dickinson pursues a new life on the Virginia frontier, where his family's values are tested by the challenges of homestead life and the moral dilemma of slave ownership.
In Inter-Library Loan System
Didn't find what you need? Items not owned by VOKAL can be requested from other Inter-Library Loan System libraries to be delivered to your local library for pickup.
Make a purchase suggestion
Can't find what you are looking for? Try our Materials Request Service. Submit Request