For black slaves Big Ben and Moses, the only thing worse than the daily cruelty of life on a Virginia plantation is the fear of being hunted down and tortured as runaways. But when Ben learns he is about to be sold to a new owner, he and Moses make the desperate choice to run. Evading brutal slave hunters and with only the light of the North Star as their guide, the pair make the grueling journey.

Few realize that Brazil was actually the largest participant in the slave trade in the New World. Forty percent of all slaves that survived the Atlantic crossing were destined for Brazil and at one time half of the population of Brazil were slaves. It was the last country to officially abolish slavery in 1888. This production charts Brazil's history of slavery using original texts, letters, accounts and decrees, with commentary by historians, anthropologists...

A stunning behind-the-curtain look into the last years of the illegal transatlantic slave trade in the United States. Long after the transatlantic slave trade was officially outlawed in the early nineteenth century by every major slave trading nation, merchants based in the United States were still sending hundreds of illegal slave ships from American ports to the African coast. The key instigators were slave traders who moved to New York City after...

Presents the story of the Whydah, a slave ship that was captured by pirates in 1717 and soon after, packed with plunder, was sunk by a brutal storm, and describes the expedition to locate the wreck and what it has uncovered.

"The most feared ship in Britain's West Africa Squadron, His Majesty's brig Black Joke was one of a handful of ships tasked with patrolling the western coast of Africa in an effort to end hundreds of years of global slave trading. Sailing after the spectacular fall of Napoleon in France, yet before the rise of Queen Victoria's England, Black Joke was first a slaving vessel itself, and one with a lightning-fast reputation; only a lucky capture in 1827...

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave...

"While Confederate statues are brought down across the country, America is reckoning with its tumultuous past and the legacy of the darker chapters of our history. In The Devil's Half Acre, New York Times bestselling author Kristen Green draws on years of deep research to tell the extraordinary hidden story of young Mary Lumpkin, an enslaved woman who sought freedom and lit a path for liberation for thousands more. Enslaved and separated from her...