HIST 2807:Slavery in the Ancient World: Suggested Books

This volume is the first to explore the range of roles that sex played in the lives of enslaved people in antiquity beyond prostitution, bringing together scholars of both Greece and Rome to consider important and complex issues. Chapters address a wealth of art, literature, and drama to analyze a wide range of issues, including gendered power dynamics, sexual violence in slave revolts, same-sex relations between free and enslaved people, and the agency of assault victims.

This book is the first comprehensive analysis of Jewish attitudes towards slavery in Hellenistic and Roman times. Against the traditional opinion that after the Babylonian Exile Jews refrained from employing slaves, Catherine Hezser shows that slavery remained a significant phenomenon of ancient Jewish everyday life and generated a discourse which resembled Graeco-Roman and early Christian views while at the same time preserving specifically Jewish nuances.

Capitalizing on the rich historical record of late antiquity, and employing sophisticated methodologies from social and economic history, this book reinterprets the end of Roman slavery. Kyle Harper challenges traditional interpretations of a transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages, arguing instead that a deep divide runs through 'late antiquity', separating the Roman slave system from its early medieval successors.

Richard S. Newman examines the key people, themes, and ideas that animated abolitionism in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries in the United States and internationally. Filled with portraits of key abolitionists - including Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Anthony Benezet, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Elizabeth Heyrick, Richard Allen, and Angelina Grimké - the book highlights abolitionists' focus on social and political action.

A historical anthology from transatlantic slavery to the Reconstruction curated by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, that makes the case for focusing on the histories of Black people as agents and architects of their own lives and ultimate liberation,

Maria W. Stewart was a trailblazing political philosopher and social reformer, who migrated from the Connecticut of her birth, south to Baltimore and then Washington, D.C. on the eve of the Civil War. Stewart was a free-born African American who became a teacher, journalist, lecturer, abolitionist, and women's rights activist. She is the first known American woman to offer political lectures before an interracial audience of men and woman.