Venture Smith presents a remarkable and deeply moving personal account in A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa, but Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America, Related by Himself. This audiobook offers listeners a firsthand glimpse into the life of a man who endured slavery, fought for freedom, and ultimately built a life of resilience and dignity in 18th-century America.Smith’s narrative is both har...

A powerful firsthand autobiography of an African man captured into slavery who ultimately purchased his freedom. Venture Smith recounts enslavement, labor, resilience, and economic determination in colonial America. The narrative stands as a rare and invaluable document of Black self-authorship, revealing the realities of bondage while affirming dignity, endurance, and agency against overwhelming injustice.

In "A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa, but Resident of USA," Venture Smith offers a captivating autobiographical account that intricately weaves together themes of displacement, resilience, and the quest for identity. Written in a straightforward style characteristic of the era's early narratives, Smith's work not only recounts his harrowing journey from African enslavement to eventual freedom, but also serves as a poignant commentary on the harsh realit...

Born a Slave: Anthology gathers a wide-ranging archive of testimony on enslavement, resistance, flight, family separation, literacy, religion, labor, and emancipation. Its selections move among autobiography, dictated narrative, spiritual reflection, political address, recollection, and abolitionist-inflected life writing, revealing both the formal variety and evidentiary force of Black testimony. Accounts of escape, self-emancipation, and the struggle to reclaim kinship stand beside narra...

Born in Chains—Collected Slave Narratives assembles a capacious archive of bondage, flight, resistance, emancipation, and memory. Spanning autobiography, dictated testimony, spiritual reflection, political argument, and documentary recollection, the volume reveals the formal range of slave narrative traditions across the Atlantic world. Accounts of escape, family separation, literacy, labor, violence, and self-emancipation stand beside meditations on religion, citizenship, and the unfinish...

Venture Smith was an African captured as a child and transported to the American colonies to be sold as a slave. As an adult, he purchased his freedom and that of his family. His history was documented when he gave a narrative of his life to a schoolteacher, who wrote it down and published it under the title A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America, Related by Himself.

“A tour de force. . . . No one has ever written a book on the Declaration quite like this one.” —Gordon S. Wood, New York Review of BooksOur Declaration has already come to be regarded as a seminal work that reinterprets the promise of American democracy through our founding text. On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration and with over a decade of hindsight, renowned political philosopher Danielle Allen recontextualizes her revelatory book with ...

A New York Times Book Review's Notable Books • A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year • Winner of the a OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature • Finalist for the 2025 Zora Awards • Trillium Book Prize-winning author Dionne Brand explores English and American literature, and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and the world, of what was possible and what was not.In Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand's first m...

The groundbreaking debut by the award-winning author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, revised and updated.Saidiya Hartman has been praised as “one of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers” (Claudia Rankine, New York Times Book Review) and “a lodestar for a generation of students and, increasingly, for politically engaged people outside the academy” (Alexis Okeowo, The New Yorker). In Scenes of Subjection—Hartman’s firs...

Civil Disobedience is an essay by Henry David Thoreau that was first published in 1849. It argues that people should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that people have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. Thoreau was motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican-American War. Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

When black women were brought from Africa to the New World as slave laborers, their value was determined by their ability to work as well as their potential to bear children, who by law would become the enslaved property of the mother's master. In Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, Jennifer L. Morgan examines for the first time how African women's labor in both senses became intertwined in the English colonies. Beginning with the ideological foundations ...

In "The Conservation of Races," W. E. B. Du Bois presents a seminal exploration of ethnicity, race, and identity, urging for the preservation of various racial groups while addressing the socio-political implications of racism. Written in a sophisticated yet accessible prose, the work reflects the intellectual fervor of the early 20th century, a time marked by burgeoning racial consciousness and the struggle for civil rights. Du Bois argues for a harmonious coexistence of races within a mu...