Recent Acquisitions to My Library

The "Colored Hero" of Harper's Ferry: John Anthony Copeland and the War Against Slavery, by Steven Lubet, Cambridge University Press, 2015.

I am currently reading Lubet's most recent biography of a John Brown raider. I thoroughly enjoyed his previous book on raider John E. Cook a few years back and was excited to see this offering from Cambridge University of Press available several months ago. Copeland's story is quite interesting, and although it appears that primary source material on Copeland is somewhat limited, Lubet's account helps us see the abolitionist war on slavery from an important perspective. 

Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade, by Maurie D. McInnis, University of Chicago Press, 2013.

I came across this particular title while visiting the University of Virginia bookstore, and quickly added it to my wishlist. Using the noted painting by British artist Eyre Crowe, which appears on its cover, the author, UVA professor Maurie D. McInnis, looks at the United States domestic slave trade and how abolitionist art influenced the anti-slavery movement.

Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia's Ex-Slaves, ed. by Charles L. Perdue, Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips.

Taking its contents from the Works Progress Administration Federal Writers Project (FWP) and the Virginia Writers Project (VWP) interviews with elderly former slaves in 1930s Virginia, this book promises to be a special read. Many of the Virginia interviewers for the FWP were African Americans, and the VWP was an all-black group, who eventually published The Negro in Virginia in 1940. While the FWP and VWP have limitations due to being conducted so far removed from the period under study, these accounts have helped twentieth and twenty-first century scholars give the public a better understanding of slavery from the viewpoint of those who lived it.