New York: Kensington, (2019). SIGNED first edition - The third novel in The Loyal League series: "Daniel Cumberland, born free in Massachusetts, studied law with dreams of helping his people dreams that died the night he was kidnapped and sold into slavery. Daniel is rescued, but hes a changed man. When hes offered entry into the Loyal League, the covert organization of Black spies who helped free him, he seizes the opportunity for vengeance against the Confederacy and those who support it. When the Union Army occupies the Florida home of Cuban Janeta Sanchez, daughter of an enslaved woman and the plantation owner who married her, her familys wealth does not protect her father from being imprisoned. Under duress and blaming herself for the arrest, Janeta agrees to infiltrate a group called the Loyal League as a double agent." She finds herself working with Daniel and questioning all she had believed. SIGNED on the dedication page and dated in the year of publication. 270 pp plus a selected bibliography and a reading group guide. ISBN: 978-1496707482.

New York: Oxford University Press, (2002). First edition - A book written to change the way you think about history - "an environmental history of the United States, with the author paying particular attention to how elements of nature became commodities and thereby isolated Americans from the natural world. [Steinberg comments on] everything from the old-time urban problem of horse excrementto the massive amounts of garbage produced by fast-food chains (McDonald's requires 'an area equivalent in size to more than 450,000 football fields' to supply its paper needs). He also tells what may be the first-ever natural history of the Civil War. . .Steinberg weaves it all together and makes the underappreciated point that 'it is quite simply wrong to view the natural world as an unchanging backdrop to the past.' It changes all the time and it has shaped Americans in ways that few of them understand." (John Miller) Illustrated with photographs, notes, bibliography, index. xiv, 347 pp. ISBN: 0-195140109.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972. dj. Hardcover first edition - Letters of the Charles Colcock Jones family: they lived on a plantation in Liberty County Georgia and the letters cover the period 1854-1868 - antebellum plantation life, the oncoming secession crisis, the participation in the war of a wealthy family, and the earliest years of Reconstruction. Includes 275 pages of biographical sketches plus over 100 pages of index Winner of the National Book Award for history in 1973. The massive original hardcover edition. Not only one of the most extensive and comprehensive archive of letters from this era, but also one of the most valuable for the insight it gives into the lives of a wealthy, slave-owning family. Includes an extensive "who's who" and 2 indexes -for free and sale. xxn. 1845 pp Map endpapers. ISBN: 0-300-012144.

New York: The Macaulay Company, (1930) dj. Hardcover first edition - An account of the outlaws "who preyed on traffic along the Natchez Trace from Natchez to New Orleans from about 1880 until 1885, among other violent and lawless acts, planned to build an empire using the labor of stolen slaves." According to Eudora Welty's biographer, this book inspired her 'The Wide Net' and 'The Robber Bridegroom.' "Even today, Coates brings the history of the Natchez Trace land prates to life. While 'Outlaw Years' may not be the most accurate history of the Trace, Coates reveals the mood and atmosphere of the 1800s. Many versions of the blood-thirsty Harpe brothers existed and Coates simply chose descriptions which made sense to him. In his defense, Coates rescued many old histories and travelogues from complete obscurity by retelling the stories of the Natchez Trace land pirates." (lemuriablog) This copy is one of the very uncommon true first editions published by Macaulay (not the Literary Guild book club edition) with a dust jacket with rather sensational claims on the back cover. Illustrated with a frontispiece and 15 internal full page plates. Bibliography. 308 pp, map endpapers.

New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, (2022) dj. Hardcover first edition - The first adult novel by this award-winning author, a "Civil War novel based on the experiences of the African Brigade, a unit of Black soldiers, including many freed, recently enslaved people, that in 1863 poured into the coastal South with Union forces, helping to hunt down rebel guerrillas. The impact these soldiers had on the South was baneful. The formerly enslaved people boomed 'Go Down Moses' as they marched. The blue coat was 'a dread costume on a freed slaves back'. A classic war story told simply and well, its meanings not forced but allowed to bubble up on their own." (NY Times) This novel focuses on one of the actual soldiers in that unit - Sgt. Richard Etheridge, the son of an enslaved woman and her master, who was taught to read and write. 290 pp. ISBN: 978-0802159199.

New York: Hyperion, (1998) dj. SIGNED hardcover first edition - The highly praised first novel by this Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper editor - "Like the stigmata of the saints, Lizzie DuBose's physical manifestations of the wounds of her African American ancestors are inexplicable and harrowing. Born in 1960, Lizzie struggles to understand why she relives her great-great-grandmother Ayo's travails, first on a slave ship, later at the hands of a ruthless slaveowner. Bleeding manacle-scars and flay marks on her back convince Lizzie that she's experiencing something more than psychosomatic pain, or the insanity for which she is hospitalized for 14 years. She knows more about Ayo's life than can be gleaned from the diary that her great-grandmother Joy kept at the turn of the century. She knows, too, what secret torment compelled her grandmother Grace to leave her children in Alabama - and to will Lizzie the trunk that holds the quilt that tells Ayo's story.. . Intricate, understated and beautifully controlled, this novel introduces a quietly provocative voice." (Publishers Weekly) SIGNED on the half title page. 235 pp. ISBN: 0-7868-6408-7.

New York: Fawcett Crest, nd (c 1962). A novel by the author of Mandingo. The acerbic Kirkus review from 1962 is too good to not quote here: "Drum is the story of three generations of Negro slaves. Beginning in Africa in the late 1700's, proceeding to Cuba, then jumping to New Orleans in the 1820's and Alabama in the early 1840's, we follow three strong and handsome young men through sex- and fight-filled lives to sudden gory deaths. Each third of this long but fast-paced book is thus an almost independent novelette.. . This is an immensely readable novel, and a good one if one may use that adjective without moral connotations. Mr. Onstott writes with a ruthless skill quite uncomplicated by any real sense of moral obligation to either his subject matter or his readers, despite the fact that his sympathies are basically in the proper place. To put it bluntly, he knows very well that avid readership is most easily obtained by alternating passages of physical violence with equal amounts of starkly salacious sex. He exploits the legendary sexuality of the Negro with a gusto which would be best appreciated by the KKK.. . An appropriate book for would-be decadents too illiterate to appreciate De Sade, this is a poor one indeed for readers who are sincerely interested in history, human beings, or reality." 512 pp. ISBN: 0-44901374.

Minneapolis: Challenge Productions, 1979. SIGNED first edition - Book 1 covers "Tom's childhood to his legal enslavement in 1865" - that is, it is an account of the earliest years of his exploitation by General Bethune, the slave owner who recognized Blind Tom's musical abilities, gave him access to a piano, but soon exploited him. "He hired out 'Blind Tom' from the age of eight years to concert promoter Perry Oliver, who toured him extensively in the US, performing as often as four times a day and earning Oliver and Bethune up to $100,000 a year, an enormous sum for the time, (equivalent to $1.5 million/year in 2004), making Blind Tom undoubtedly the nineteenth century's most highly compensated pianist. General Bethune's family eventually made a fortune estimated at $750,000 at the hands of Blind Tom. Oliver marketed Tom as a 'Barnum-style freak' advertising the transformation from animal to artist. In the media, Tom was frequently compared to a bear, baboon, or mastiff. (Wikipedia). While 'slavery' was supposedly abolished in 1865, Blind Tom remained bound to his "guardians" who continued to exploit him. Includes an introduction by Dr. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. INSCRIBED by Southall on the title page, and also initialled underneath her photograph on the back cover. Extensive bibliographical notes, appendices. xx, 108 pp.

New York: Amistad / HarperCollins, (2003.) dj. SIGNED (on a bookplate) hardcover - Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Award, a finalist for the National Book Award, this is a book that truly deserves all of the acclaim it has received. The story of free colored slaveholders in 1840's Virginia is both historically accurate and moving. Author Jeffrey Lent called this "a modern masterpiece that staggers the imagination...the most powerful and deeply realized novel I've read in a long time. This is a work that transforms and transports to such a thorough degree that when you finally step out 'The Known World,' you're shaken and turned around, never again to be the same. This novel is what literature can and should be.' Cover featuring a Eudora Welty photograph. SIGNED on a bookplate affixed to the front endpaper. 388 pp. ISBN: 0-06-0557540.

Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, (2004) dj. SIGNED hardcover first edition - Uncommon hardcover edition of this work in which Walker "blurs the lines between poetry, fiction, and history to tell the story of the Lewis and Clark expedition from the point of view of Clarks slave, York, the first African American to traverse the continent. These poems vividly present the intricacies of Yorks personality and form a narrative of his saga - a physical journey from the plantation to the great northwest and a spiritual journey from a humble servant to a man yearning for fulfillment and freedom. York bears the burden of heavy labor as the expedition travels hundreds of miles of waterways in search of a Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean. Along the way, York empathizes with the Native Americans he encounters and joins them in mourning his masters' dominion over the land and their misuse of the Earths riches." INSCRIBED on the half title page and dated in the year of publication. The third book in the Kentucky Voices series. 71 pp. ISBN: 0-813123224.

Carbondale, IL: Swedish Pioneer Historical Society / Southern Illinois University Press, (1982) dj. Hardcover first edition - Letters and diary entries by Roos, who left the constraints she felt doomed to as a woman in Sweden in the 1850s and so traveled to America to test her ability to be independent, spending four years on a plantation in South Carolina as a governess, just as the slavery debate was entering its most heated phase. She comments on contrasts: freedom and slavery, cold and heat, great industriousness and total apathy, but when she returns to Sweden, confident in her independence, she has only scorn for the arguments she heard espousing the "good" of slavery. As she pleaded for the rights of women in Sweden, she drew analogies between those theories of slavery and the treatment of women. Translated and with a preface by Carl L. Anderson, who notes that at the end of the 19th century she was recognized as one of the 'three pioneering women and leaders who transformed social and economic conditions for women.'Photographs, footnotes. xvi, 152 pp. ISBN: 0-80931018X.

San Francisco: The Colt Press, 1939. Hardcover first edition - An account of the 1859 duel which resulted in Broderick's death - "An argument about the future of slavery led to a deadly duel near Lake Merced, south of San Francisco. The rivals, David Broderick and David Terry, were two prominent politicians who at one time had been friends. Broderick, a U.S. senator, was a leader of the Free Soil wing of the Democratic Party, which opposed the expansion of slavery. As a legislator, he had blocked laws introduced to ban black people from the state. He had fought unsuccessfully against the California Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed whites who had brought slaves into California before statehood to hold them in bondage. Terry, a California Supreme Court Chief justice, had lobbied for California to enter the Union as a slave state, and was a member of the dominant pro-slavery Chiv wing of the Democratic Party. While he served as a justice, the state Supreme Court ordered fugitive slave Archy Lee returned to his enslaver. When Terry lost his reelection bid because of his pro-slavery views, he blamed Broderick. The two men exchanged insults and Terry challenged Broderick to a duel." (Gold Chains) Illustrated with Woodcuts by Malette Dean. Typography by Jane Grabhorn, Press work by Lawton R. Kennedy. 89 pp. plus colophon.

Toronto: Harper Collins, (2009) dj. Hardcover first edition - A beautiful full-color illustrated edition of this award-winning novel by this Canadian author, originally published in 2007. Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize and nominated in the United States (where it appeared under the title "Someone Knows My Name") for the Huston Wright Legacy Award. Illustrated with more than 150 images - photographs, early maps and documents, archival photos, period paintings and never before-published pages from the original handwritten ledger from which the novel draws its name. This is the story of Aminata Diallo, abducted from her West African village and enslaved on indigo plantation in South Carolina, to New York City, and after she has a chance to enter her name in the British military ledger known as the Book of Negroes to Canada and the harsh climate of Nova Scotia, and eventually back to the coast of Sierra Leone and to London. Includes a new introduction to this edition by the author, as well as an historical note and suggestions for further reading. A large and heavy book, richly produced, with wide margins, and illustrated map endpapers in addition to the illustrations throughout. xv, 510 pp. ISBN: 978-1554686957.