Gathering slave narratives, memoirs, depositions, travel accounts, and abolitionist documentation, *100$ REWARD ON MY HEAD* charts the lived realities and afterlives of Atlantic-world slavery. Its texts move between harrowing scenes of sale, labor, flight, family separation, literacy, resistance, and self-emancipation, while adopting forms as varied as spiritual testimony, legal witness, adventure narrative, and political indictment. Accounts of escape by ingenious means, public witnessing, and the pursuit of freedom give the volume particular dramatic and ethical force. The contributors include formerly enslaved writers, Black abolitionists, reformers, and allied documentarians whose perspectives span the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Figures associated with abolitionism, antislavery print culture, Reconstruction-era self-definition, and campaigns against racial violence place individual experience within broader struggles over citizenship, education, labor, and human rights. Their differing locations-across the Caribbean, the United States, and transatlantic circuits of reform-reveal slavery not as a single institution but as a system contested through memory, testimony, mobility, and collective action. This volume is recommended for readers seeking both an accessible introduction to slave narrative traditions and a capacious archive for sustained study. Read together, these works illuminate the formal ingenuity and historical authority of firsthand testimony while inviting comparison among gendered, regional, and political experiences. It offers a vital opportunity to encounter many voices in dialogue, strengthening historical understanding and ethical attention to freedom's unfinished meanings.
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This edition brings to you the finest collection of personal memoirs from the true champions of liberty. With their powerful narratives, they have changed people's convictions about slavery and shook the very foundation of this social evil: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup The Underground Railroad The Willie Lynch Letter: The Making of Slave! Confessions of Nat Turner Narrative of Sojourner Truth Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs Harriet: The Moses of Her People History of Mary Prince Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, by William and Ellen Craft Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom, by Louis Hughes Narrative of the Life of J. D. Green, a Runaway Slave Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington Narrative of Olaudah Equiano Behind The Scenes - 30 Years a Slave & 4 Years in the White House, by Elizabeth Keckley Father Henson's Story of His Own Life Fifty Years in Chains, by Charles Ball Twenty-Two Years a Slave and Forty Years a Freeman, by Austin Steward Narrative of the Life of Henry Bibb Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave Story of Mattie J. Jackson A Slave Girl's Story, by Kate Drumgoold From the Darkness Cometh the Light, by Lucy A. Delaney Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy Narrative of Joanna; An Emancipated Slave, of Surinam Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped in a 3x2 Feet Box Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley Buried Alive For a Quarter of a Century - Life of William Walker Pictures of Slavery in Church and State Dying Speech of Stephen Smith Who Was Executed for Burglary Life of Joseph Mountain Charge of Aiding and Abetting in the Rescue of a Fugitive Slave Lynch Law in All Its Phases Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act Captain Canot Pearl Incident: Personal Memoir of Daniel Drayton History of Abolition of African Slave-Trade History of American Abolitionism