Slavery in Colonial America, 1619-1776

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Betty Wood provides a sweeping survey of slavery across colonial America in this brief, highly readable, and informative volume. She has brought together the diverse strands that make up the tragic history of African enslavement from New England to the Southern colonies and woven them into a compelling narrative. A selection of important primary documents and a bibliographic essay make the volume an ideal introduction for students. -- Randy Sparks, director of the Deep South Regional Humanities Center, Tulane University Slavery in Colonial America offers a concise yet incisive introduction to recent research. Illustrated with carefully chosen selections from primary documents, it is well adapted to classroom use. Betty Wood's text offers a thoughtful summary of the main themes bound up with the adoption and renunciation of slavery in colonial America, paying full attention to experiences of the enslaved. Wood situates the development of slavery in British North America within the context of an emerging Atlantic World. -- Peter G. Thompson, National Defense University Betty Wood provides us with a powerful and moving account of colonial American slavery not only as a social institution and a labor system but also as a profoundly human experience of exploitation and endurance. The reader emerges with a new understanding of the complexity of race relations in the 17th and 18th centuries and a new appreciation for the tensions between the rhetoric of freedom and the reality of enslavement. -- Carol Berkin, Baruch College and The Graduate Center, CUNY Finally, the perfect book for teaching undergraduates about colonial era slavery: brief, well-written, up-to-date, and all the useful extras every teacher will want. -- Sally E. Hadden, Florida State University Betty Wood's ambitious reconceptualization of unfree labor in the English mainland colonies, which rightly places the focus on the enslaved and their strategies of survival and resistance, should enlighten specialists and students alike. Wood's engaging prose and elegant organization skillfully contextualizes the thirty-two documents included here and makes this study a natural for classroom use. -- Douglas R. Egerton, Le Moyne College Slavery has a long history in America. Most of that history happened in the colonial period. To understand America we need to understand slavery and to understand slavery we have to know what it was like between 1619 and 1776, when most enslaved persons were African, when the transatlantic slave trade flourished and when relatively few enslaved persons were Christian. Betty Wood, one of the foremost scholars of slavery in this crucial period, has provided us with a brilliant synthesis of the best scholarship on colonial slavery in this much-needed book. Slavery in Colonial America is the ideal introduction to the most significant institution in early American history. Its combination of succinct and up-to-date summaries of the salient facts about colonial slavery and aptly chosen documents illustrating the not-very-peculiar institution give students all they need to understand a very important topic. This is the best book in its field and is much welcomed. -- Trevor Burnard, University of Sussex Betty Wood provides a concise yet insightful synthesis of this literature while carefully pointing out some of the more important and significant interpretations along the way. . . . Slavery in Colonial America offers both expert and the novice a compelling account of the history of race based slavery throughout the colonial period. . . . While this volume ought to find a wide popular audience, some of the supplementary materials included at the end of the volume, specifically the selected primary documents that correspond with each chapter and the bibliographic essay, make this brief synthesis quite promising for use in the college classroom, where it will allow coming generations of students to grasp the beauty, strength, and horror of the African American experience of race-based slavery throughout colonial America. -- Richard Bailey, University of Kentucky The best book of its type in the field. * History: The Journal Of The American Historical Association *