Born in Chains - Collected Slave Narratives
First-Person Testimonies of Enslavement, Escape, Resistance, and the Fight for FreedomBy Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Booker T. Washington, William Grimes, Solomon Northup, Sojourner Truth, Mary Prince, Zamba Zembola, Boyrereau Brinch, Olaudah Equiano, Solomon Bayley, Henry Watson, John Brown, William Craft, Ellen Craft, J. W. Loguen, John Andrew Jackson, Willie Lynch, Nat Turner, Louis Hughes, Jacob D. Green, Elizabeth Keckley, Josiah Henson, Charles Ball, Austin Steward, Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, L. S. Thompson, James W. C. Pennington, Kate Drumgoold, Lucy A. Delaney, Moses Grandy, Leonard Black, Henry Box Brown, Phillis Wheatley, James L. Smith, Joseph Mountain, Peter Still, Annie L. Burton, Israel Campbell, Lewis Clarke, Francis Fedric, William Still, Moses Roper, Joseph Vance Lewis, Rev. Greensbury Washington Offley, John Thompson, Venture Smith, Isaac D. Williams, William Walker, Octavia Albert
Length646h 54m
About this audiobook
Born in Chains—Collected Slave Narratives assembles a capacious archive of bondage, flight, resistance, emancipation, and memory. Spanning autobiography, dictated testimony, spiritual reflection, political argument, and documentary recollection, the volume reveals the formal range of slave narrative traditions across the Atlantic world. Accounts of escape, family separation, literacy, labor, violence, and self-emancipation stand beside meditations on religion, citizenship, and the unfinished meanings of freedom, making the collection both a literary achievement and a vital historical record. Its contributors include formerly enslaved people, abolitionist speakers, writers, reformers, and witnesses whose lives intersect with transatlantic slavery, Black print culture, antislavery activism, Reconstruction, and the long struggle for civil rights. From Caribbean and African-born narrators to women and men who documented enslavement in the United States, these voices complicate any singular account of captivity. Their narratives participate in the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement while also asserting intellectual authority, familial memory, and individual personhood against systems designed to erase them. This volume is indispensable for readers of African American literature, history, autobiography, and human rights. It offers an exceptional opportunity to compare voices, genres, and political strategies within one collection, illuminating both shared structures of oppression and radically distinct lived experiences. Read together, these works foster a searching dialogue about testimony, freedom, survival, and the enduring ethical demands of historical memory.
Audiobook details
Rating★★★★★ 4.7 (19)
Includes Amazon, Goodreads
GenreHistory, Literary Classics
Length646 hrs 54 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateFeb 15, 2023
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1The Voices of Slaves (Annotated)
2NARRATIVES:
3Frederick Douglass:
4Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
5CHAPTER I
Show all chaptersShow less
6CHAPTER II
7CHAPTER III
8CHAPTER IV
9CHAPTER V
10CHAPTER VI
11CHAPTER VII
12CHAPTER VIII
13CHAPTER IX
14CHAPTER X
15CHAPTER XI
16Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
17INTRODUCTION
18FIRST PART
19CHAPTER I. AUTHOR'S BIRTH
20CHAPTER II. REMOVAL FROM GRANDMOTHER'S
21CHAPTER III. TROUBLES OF CHILDHOOD
22CHAPTER IV. A GENERAL SURVEY OF THE SLAVE PLANTATION
23CHAPTER V. A SLAVEHOLDER'S CHARACTER
24CHAPTER VI. A CHILD'S REASONING
25CHAPTER VII. LUXURIES AT THE GREAT HOUSE
26CHAPTER VIII. CHARACTERISTICS OF OVERSEERS
27CHAPTER IX. CHANGE OF LOCATION
28CHAPTER X. LEARNING TO READ
29CHAPTER XI. GROWING IN KNOWLEDGE
30CHAPTER XII. RELIGIOUS NATURE AWAKENED
31CHAPTER XIII. THE VICISSITUDES OF SLAVE LIFE
32CHAPTER XIV. EXPERIENCE IN ST. MICHAELS
33CHAPTER XV. COVEY, THE NEGRO BREAKER
34CHAPTER XVI. ANOTHER PRESSURE OF THE TYRANT'S VISE
35CHAPTER XVII. THE LAST FLOGGING
36CHAPTER XVIII. NEW RELATIONS AND DUTIES
37CHAPTER XIX. THE RUNAWAY PLOT
38CHAPTER XX
39CHAPTER XXI. ESCAPE FROM SLAVERY
40SECOND PART
41CHAPTER I. ESCAPE FROM SLAVERY
42CHAPTER II. LIFE AS A FREEMAN
43CHAPTER III. INTRODUCED TO THE ABOLITIONISTS
44CHAPTER IV. RECOLLECTIONS OF OLD FRIENDS
45CHAPTER V. ONE HUNDRED CONVENTIONS
46CHAPTER VI. IMPRESSIONS ABROAD
47CHAPTER VII. TRIUMPHS AND TRIALS
48CHAPTER VIII. JOHN BROWN AND MRS. STOWE
49CHAPTER IX. INCREASING DEMANDS OF THE SLAVE POWER
50CHAPTER X. THE BEGINNING OF THE END
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