Most Americans know the story of slavery through a single lens.
But what if there was another chapter of American history that rarely appears in textbooks?
Long before the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of Europeans arrived in the American colonies as convicts, prisoners, indentured laborers, political dissidents, kidnapped children, and frontier captives. Thousands were bought and sold into slavery. Many endured brutal labor conditions. Many never lived to see freedom.
Yet their stories have largely disappeared from public memory.
In Beyond the Plantation: Slavery, Race, and the Rewriting of History, readers are taken deep into the forgotten world of white colonial slavery and bondage, frontier captivity, Atlantic human trafficking, Native American slave trading, black slave ownership, and the economic systems that transformed human beings into property.
Inside you'll discover:
• The hidden history of white slavery in colonial America
• Britain's transportation of convicts and political prisoners
• Frontier raids and the capture of white settlers
• Native American slave trading and captive markets
• Black slaveowners and the complexities of slavery in America
• How race gradually became law in the colonies
• The economic engine behind human bondage
• Why many of these stories disappeared from mainstream education
Provocative, thoroughly researched, and unapologetically challenging, Beyond the Plantation examines the forgotten realities of American slavery and asks readers to reconsider what they truly know about one of the most important subjects in American history.
Because history is rarely as simple as we are taught.
