Books like Black majority by Peter H. Wood

A chilling memoir detailing Solomon Northup's harrowing experience as a captive on a Louisiana plantation for twelve years, from 1841 to 1853.

Kenneth M. Stampp’s history examines U.S. slavery as a system of labor exploitation, analyzing work, resistance, discipline, and daily life of slaves while challenging myths about black attitudes and slave treatment.

From Slavery to Freedom chronicles the rise of slavery, the blending of European and African cultures in the New World, and the development of a distinct Black culture and resistance in the United States.

Craig Steven Wilder exposes how America’s leading colleges—Harvard, Yale, Princeton and others—were funded by and complicit in slavery, revealing a hidden history of racism in higher education.

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.

"In just a few years, diversity has become America's most visible cultural ideal. Corporations alter their recruitment and hiring policies in the name of a diverse workforce. Universities institute new admissions procedures in the name of a diverse student body. Presidents choose their major appointees in the name of a diverse cabinet. And what diversity proponents have in mind, Peter Wood argues, is not the dictionary meaning of the word - variety and multiplicity - but a new and often narrow kind of conformity." "Whether as prescribed numerial outcome or as the celebration of cultural difference, diversity, according to Wood, is now a deadening force in American life, a cliche that promotes group stereotypes and undermines any real diversity of ideas and individuals.". "In this learned and entertaining book, Wood has undertaken nothing less than the biography of a concept. Drawing on classic texts of history and anthropology, science and religion, he shows that - contrary to the self-flattering assumptions of our time - Americans of earlier eras often met diversty open-mindedly, with a combination of awe, delight and curiosity."--BOOK JACKET.

Edmund Sears Morgan traces how early Virginia’s tobacco economy and growing reliance on enslaved labor shaped the nation’s founding ideals, exposing the paradoxical link between liberty and bondage in American history.

Awesome. Excellent read. Could not put it down.

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.

Sterling Stuckey’s study examines how African cultural traditions shaped the shared identity of enslaved peoples in the American South, highlighting a persistent Afro‑centric ethos that influenced race relations after emancipation.