Washoe County Library System

"'How the Word is Passed' is Clint Smith's revealing, contemporary portrait of America as a slave owning nation. Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks— those that are honest about the past and those that are not— that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nations collective history, and ourselves." --

Bridging women's history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South's slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often...

When a troubled Revolutionary War veteran requires his slave, Washington, to become a breeding sire, Washington's resolve to stay faithful to his West African spiritual legacy leads to a loving relationship with an enslaved healer woman.

"This first volume in the Library of America edition of Butler’s collected works opens with her masterpiece, Kindred, one of the landmark American novels of the last half century. Its heroine, Dana, a Black woman, is pulled back and forth between the present and the pre–Civil War past, where she finds herself enslaved on the plantation of a white ancestor whose life she must save to preserve her own. In Fledgling, an amnesiac discovers that...

Octavia E. Butler's bestselling literary science-fiction masterpiece, Kindred, now in graphic novel format. More than 35 years after its release, Kindred continues to draw in new readers with its deep exploration of the violence and loss of humanity caused by slavery in the United States, and its complex and lasting impact on the present day. Adapted by celebrated academics and comics artists Damian Duffy and John Jennings, this graphic novel powerfully...

Tells the story of how thirteen-year-old slave Charles Mitchell escaped from James Tilton's household on a steamer bound for Victoria and received help from free blacks to achieve freedom in Canada in 1860.

An adaptation of Alex Haley's "Roots", in which Haley traces his African American family's history from the mid-18th century to the Reconstruction era.

"Local legend has it that a slave master was buried standing up in the plantation's family tomb. Why? So that he could continue overseeing his slaves--even in death! When the Qwikpickers hear about this, they decide it's high time to administer some 200-year-overdue justice and knock him down. Mission Kick a Corpse is on"--