Books like Remembering slavery by Ira Berlin

Douglas A. Blackmon exposes a hidden chapter of American history—an "Age of Neoslavery" that subjected African Americans to forced labor and debt slavery from the late 19th century through the 1940s.

A study, by J. F. Miller, examining how emancipation impacted African Americans’ mental and physical health, noting increases in insanity and tuberculosis.

Here is the United States Congress in the 1830s, grappling (or trying unsuccessfully to avoid grappling) with the gravest moral dilemma inherited from the framers of the Constitution. Here is the concept (and reality) of the ownership of human beings confronting three of the most powerful ideas of the time: American republicanism, American civil liberties, American representative government. This book re-creates an episode in our past, now forgotten, that once stirred and engrossed the nation: the congressional fight over petitions against slavery. The action takes place in the House of Representatives. Beginning in 1835, a new flood of abolitionist petitions pours into the House. The powers-that-be respond with a gag rule as their means of keeping these appeals off the House floor and excluding them from national discussion. A small band of congressmen, led by former president John Quincy Adams, battles against successive versions of the gag and introduces petitions in spite of it. Then, in February 1837, Adams raises the stakes by forcing the House to cope with what he calls "The Most Important Question to come before this House since its first origin": Do slaves have the right of petition? When the Whigs take over in 1841, some expect the gag rule to be repudiated, but instead it is made permanent. A small insurgent group of Whigs, collaborating with Adams, opposes party policy and makes opposition to slavery their top priority. They constitute the seedbed for the formation of the Republican Party which will be, in the next decade, the beginning of the end of slavery. Congressional leaders try to censure Adams, and his well-publicized "trial" in the House brings the entire matter to the nation's attention. The anti-Adams effort fails, and finally, after nine years of persistent support of the right of petition, Adams succeeds in defeating the gag rule. . Throughout, one can see the gradual assembling not only of the political but also of the moral and intellectual elements for the ultimate assault on American slavery. When John Quincy Adams dies, virtually on the House floor, the young congressman Abraham Lincoln is sitting in the chamber.

"I never talk to nobody 'bout this" was the response of one aged African American when asked by a Works Project Administration field worker to share memories of his life in slavery and after emancipation. He and other ex-slaves were uncomfortable with the memories of a time when black and white lives were interwoven through human bondage. Yet the WPA field workers overcame the old people's reticence, and American West scholars T. Lindsay Baker and Julie P. Baker have collected all the known WPA Oklahoma "slave narratives" in this volume for the first time - including fourteen never published before. Their careful editorial notes detail what is known about the interviewers and the process of preparing the narratives. The interviews were made in the late 1930s in Oklahoma. Although many African Americans had relocated there after emancipation in 1865, some interviewees had been slaves of Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, or Creeks in the Indian Territory. Their narratives constitute important primary sources on the foodways, agricultural practices, and home life of Oklahoma Indians. This definitive, indexed edition will be an important resource for Oklahoma and Southwest historians as well as those interested in the history of African Americans, slavery, and Oklahoma's Five Tribes. For those studying the generation of African American men and women who over a century ago initiated black life in Oklahoma, the slave narratives are a major source of "collective memory."

A 19th-century autobiographical account of a West Indian slave woman detailing her experiences in Bermuda, Antigua, and Britain.

Explores emancipation as a complex, uneven process beyond Lincoln’s proclamation and 1865 defeat, emphasizing the active role of enslaved people and the lasting social upheaval across the United States.

"Valuable new version of Biografía de un cimarrón includes Hill's expert translation; brief but informative preface about Esteban Montejo (the book's first-person narrator); Barnet's afterword (which replaces, albeit partially, his original introduction), in which he explains his understanding of literatura testimonal; and a glossary of terms. Original work was first translated as Autobiography of a runaway slave by Jocasta Innes (1968)"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

Ira Berlin’s Pulitzer‑winning study traces African‑American slavery in the United States from the seventeenth century to its abolition, linking each era of slave generations to the broader Atlantic and American historical transformations.

Awesome. Excellent read. Could not put it down.

A comprehensive collection of Frederick Douglass’s correspondence, diaries, speeches, and editorial work from 1847 to 1895, including his abolitionist newspaper, North Star, and his role in the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.

Reconstruction of the lives of 110 enslaved Africans from Benin and Nigeria who arrived in Alabama's Clotilda in 1860, their journey through the slave trade, and their post‑emancipation community known as African Town.

The Weeping Time unpacks America’s largest slave auction, tracing the life stories of over 400 enslaved people and the lasting impact on their descendants.

"Bondspeople who fled from slavery during and after the Civil War did not expect that their flight toward freedom would lead to sickness, disease, suffering, and death. But the war produced the largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century, and as historian Jim Downs reveals in this groundbreaking volume, it had deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands of freed people. In Sick from Freedom, Downs recovers the untold story of one of the bitterest ironies in American history--that the emancipation of the slaves, seen as one of the great turning points in U.S. history, had devastating consequences for innumerable freedpeople. Drawing on massive new research into the records of the Medical Division of the Freedmen's Bureau-a nascent national health system that cared for more than one million freed slaves-he shows how the collapse of the plantation economy released a plague of lethal diseases. With emancipation, African Americans seized the chance to move, migrating as never before. But in their journey to freedom, they also encountered yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, dysentery, malnutrition, and exposure. To address this crisis, the Medical Division hired more than 120 physicians, establishing some forty underfinanced and understaffed hospitals scattered throughout the South, largely in response to medical emergencies. Downs shows that the goal of the Medical Division was to promote a healthy workforce, an aim which often excluded a wide range of freedpeople, including women, the elderly, the physically disabled, and children. Downs concludes by tracing how the Reconstruction policy was then implemented in the American West, where it was disastrously applied to Native Americans. The widespread medical calamity sparked by emancipation is an overlooked episode of the Civil War and its aftermath, poignantly revealed in Sick from Freedom"-- "Sick from Freedom provides the first study of the health conditions of emancipated slaves and reveals the epidemics, illnesses, and poverty that former slaves suffered from when slavery ended and freedom began"--

Explores the overlooked lives of millions of child slaves in the 19th‑century Southern United States, detailing how their childhoods were taken through forced labor, harsh plantation discipline, and family separation.