"Fifty Years in Chains" is an autobiography of a fugitive slave,Charles Ball, where he describes his life as a slave under various masters and his service in the Chesapeake Bay Flotilla of the U.S. Navy under the command of Commodore Joshua Barney in the War of 1812. Charles Ball (1780 - unknown) was an enslaved African-American from Maryland who worked as a cook and sailor.According to his Autobiography his grandfather was a man from a noble African family who was enslaved and brought to Calvert County, Maryland around 1730.

Fifty Years in Chains: Or, the Life of an American Slave (1859) was an abridged and unauthorized reprint of the earlier Slavery in the United States (1836). In the narratives, Ball describes his experiences as a slave, including the uncertainty of slave life and the ways in which the slaves are forced to suffer inhumane conditions. He recounts the qualities of his various masters and the ways in which his fortune depended on their temperament. As slave narrative scholar William L. Andrews has noted, Ball's oft-repeated narrative directly influenced the manner and matter of later fugitive slave.

"A model reference work that can be used with profit and delight by general readers as well as by more advanced students of Twain. Highly recommended." - Library Journal The Routledge Encyclopedia of Mark Twain includes more than 700 alphabetically arranged entries that cover a full variety of topics on this major American writer's life, intellectual milieu, literary career, and achievements. Because so much of Twain's travel narratives, essays, letters, sketches, autobiography, journalism and fiction reflect his personal experience, particular attention is given to the delicate relationship between art and life, between artistic interpretations and their factual source. This comprehensive resource includes information on: Twain’s life and times: the author's childhood in Missouri and apprenticeship as a riverboat pilot, early career as a journalist in the West, world travels, friendships with well-known figures, reading and education, family life and career Complete Works: including novels, travel narratives, short stories, sketches, burlesques, and essays Significant characters, places, and landmarks Recurring concerns, themes or concepts: such as humor, language; race, war, religion, politics, imperialism, art and science Twain’s sources and influences. Useful for students, researchers, librarians and teachers, this volume features a chronology, a special appendix section tracking the poet's genealogy, and a thorough index. Each entry also includes a bibliography for further study.

Given the rise of new interdisciplinary and methodological approaches to African American and Black Atlantic studies, The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative will offer a fresh, wide-ranging assessment of this major American literary genre. The volume will begin with articles that consider the fundamental concerns of gender, sexuality, community, and the Christian ethos of suffering and redemption that are central to any understanding of slave narratives. The chapters that follow will interrogate the various agendas behind the production of both pre- and post-Emancipation narratives and take up the various interpretive problems they pose. Strategic omissions and veiled gestures were often necessary in these life accounts as they revealed disturbing, too-painful truths, far beyond what white audiences were prepared to hear. While touching upon the familiar canonical autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, the Handbook will pay more attention to the under-studied narratives of Josiah Henson, Sojourner Truth, William Grimes, Henry Box Brown, and other often-overlooked accounts. In addition to the literary autobiographies of bondage, the volume will anatomize the powerful WPA recordings of interviews with former slaves during the late 1930s. With essays on the genre's imaginative afterlife, its final essays will chart the emergence and development of neoslave narratives, most notably in Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, Toni Morrisons's Beloved and Octavia Butler's provocative science fiction novel, Kindred. In short, the Handbook will provide a long-overdue assessment of the state of the genre and the vital scholarship that continues to grow around it, work that is offering some of the most provocative analysis emerging out of the literary studies discipline as a whole.

The powerful story of slavery that has become a classic of American autobiography, in an authoritative edition “This edition is the most valuable teaching tool on slavery and abolition available today. It is exceptional.”—Nancy Hewitt, Distinguished Professor Emerita, Rutgers University The autobiography of Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, is widely regarded as a classic of American nineteenth-century history, of African-American studies, and of literature. In 1845, just seven years after his escape from slavery, the young Douglass published this powerful account of his life as a slave and his triumph over oppression. The book, which marked the beginning of Douglass’s career as an impassioned writer, journalist, and orator for the abolitionist cause, reveals the terrors he faced as a slave, the brutalities of his owners and overseers, and his harrowing escape to the North. This edition of the book, based on the authoritative text that appears in Yale University Press’s multivolume edition of the Frederick Douglass Papers, is the only edition of Douglass’s Narrative designated as an Approved Text by the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions. It includes a chronology of Douglass’s life, a thorough introduction by the eminent Douglass scholar John Blassingame, historical notes, and reader responses to the first edition of 1845. “None so dramatically as Douglass integrated both the horror and the great quest of the African-American experience into the deep stream of American autobiography. He advanced and extended that tradition and is rightfully designated one of its greatest practitioners.”—John W. Blassingame, from the introduction

To Tell a Free Story: Excerpt (1986) -- From Behind the Veil: Excerpt (1979) -- Afterword -- Chronology -- Four Maryland Families -- Historical Annotation to the Narrative -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y

Richard Dunn reconstructs the lives of three generations of slaves on a sugar estate in Jamaica and a plantation in Virginia, to understand the starkly different forms slavery took. Deadly work regimens and rampant disease among Jamaican slaves contrast with population expansion in Virginia leading to the selling of slaves and breakup of families.

Winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award Winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize Winner of the Avery O. Craven Award Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each. What emerges is not only the brutal economics of trading but the vast and surprising interdependencies among the actors involved. Using recently discovered court records, slaveholders’ letters, nineteenth-century narratives of former slaves, and the financial documentation of the trade itself, Johnson reveals the tenuous shifts of power that occurred in the market’s slave coffles and showrooms. Traders packaged their slaves by “feeding them up,” dressing them well, and oiling their bodies, but they ultimately relied on the slaves to play their part as valuable commodities. Slave buyers stripped the slaves and questioned their pasts, seeking more honest answers than they could get from the traders. In turn, these examinations provided information that the slaves could utilize, sometimes even shaping a sale to their own advantage. Johnson depicts the subtle interrelation of capitalism, paternalism, class consciousness, racism, and resistance in the slave market, to help us understand the centrality of the “peculiar institution” in the lives of slaves and slaveholders alike. His pioneering history is in no small measure the story of antebellum slavery.