In the summer of 1716, a Cornish cabin boy named Thomas Pellow was captured at sea by Barbary pirates and sold into human bondage to the despotic sultan of Morocco. This riveting memoir of a slave narrative is a story of pluck, and endurance in the face of barbaric splendour and suffering. A remarkable testament to the strength of the human spirit and to all those snatched from their homes and taken in chains to the great slave markets of North Africa. A bestseller in its day and a classic...

Santería represents the first in-depth, scholarly account of a profound way of wisdom that is growing in importance in America today. A professional academic and himself a participant in the Santeríacommunity of the Bronx for several years, Joseph Murphy offers a powerful description and insightful analysis of this African/Cuban religion. He traces the survival of an ancient spiritual path from its West African Yoruba origins, through nearly two centuries of slavery in the New Wor...

This book examines the relationship between jihad and genocide, past and present. Richard L. Rubenstein takes a close look at the violent interpretations of jihad and how they have played out in the past hundred years, from the Armenian genocide through current threats to Israel. Rubenstein's unflinching study of the potential for fundamentalist jihad to initiate targeted violence raises pressing questions in a time when questions of religious co-existence, particularly in the Middle East,...

As the founder of Islam Muhammad is one of the most influential figures in history. The furor surrounding the Satanic Verses and the Danish cartoon crisis reminded the world of the tremendous importance of the prophet of Islam, Muhammad. Learning about his life and understanding its importance, however, has always proven difficult. Our knowledge of Muhammad comes from the biography of him written by his followers, but Western historians have questioned the reliability of this story in thei...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book AwardBased on hitherto unexamined sources: interviews with ex-slaves, diaries and accounts by former slaveholders, this "rich and admirably written book" (Eugene Genovese, The New York Times Book Review) aims to show how, during the Civil War and after Emancipation, blacks and whites interacted in ways that dramatized not only their mutual dependency, but the ambiguities and tensions that had always been la...

"As the world grapples with religious extremism and consequent violence in the world of Islam, Sayyid Riyadh Al-Hakeem provides us a valuable opportunity to understand the political dynamics and theological debates within Islam. I had the privilege to have a long conversation with Sayyid in 2014 in Najaf focusing on the developments in the Muslim world. I was struck by his scholarly demeanor, thoughtful approach and creative thinking geared towards peaceful resolutions to the challenges fa...

Originally published in 1897, “Thirty Years a Slave” is a first person account of life as a slave written by Louis Hughes (1832–1913), an American-born slave belonging to a plantation owner in Charlottesville, Virginia. Having learned to read and write in secret, Hughes wrote this memoir and later became a successful businessman. “Thirty Years a Slave” offers a glimpse into the harrowing life of American slaves in the nineteenth century and is highly recommended for those wishing to learn ...

How global competition brought the plantation kingdom to its knees.In 1850, America’s plantation economy reigned supreme. U.S. cotton dominated world markets, and American rice, sugarcane, and tobacco grew throughout a vast farming empire that stretched from Maryland to Texas. Four million enslaved African Americans toiled the fields, producing global commodities that enriched the most powerful class of slaveholders the world had ever known. But fifty years later—a...

The American Crucible furnishes a vivid and authoritative history of the rise and fall of slavery in the Americas. For over three centuries enslavement promoted the rise of capitalism in the Atlantic world. The New World became the crucible for a succession of fateful experiments in colonization, silver mining, plantation agriculture, racial enslavement, colonial rebellion, slave witness and slave resistance. Slave produce raised up empires, fostered new cultures of consumption an...

One of the greatest works of American autobiography, in a definitive Library of America text: Published seven years after his escape from slavery, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) is a powerful account of the cruelty and oppression of the Maryland plantation culture into which Frederick Douglass was born. It brought him to the forefront of the antislavery movement and drew thousands, black and white, to the cause. Written in pa...

Drawing on extensive research in the archives of Russia and Uzbekistan, Douglas Northrop here reconstructs the turbulent history of a Soviet campaign that sought to end the seclusion of Muslim women. In Uzbekistan it focused above all on a massive effort to eliminate the heavy horsehair-and-cotton veils worn by many women and girls. This campaign against the veil was, in Northrop's view, emblematic of the larger Soviet attempt to bring the proletarian revolution to Muslim Central Asia, a r...