Once We Were Slaves

Laura Arnold Leibman is Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, OR. Her work focuses on religion and the daily lives of women and children in early America, and uses everyday objects to help bring their stories to life. She is the author of Indian Converts (U Mass Press, 2008) and Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (Vallentine Mitchell, 2012), which won a National Jewish Book Award, a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies, and was selected as one of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2013. Known, too, for her scholarship in Digital Humanities, Laura served as the Academic Director for the award-winning multimedia public television series American Passages: A Literary Survey (2003).

• IllustrationsPreface Chapter 1: Origins (Bridgetown, 1793-1798)Chapter 2: From Slave to Free (Bridgetown, 1801)Chapter 3: From Christian to Jew (Suriname, 1811-12)Chapter 4: The Tumultuous Island (Bridgetown, 1812-1817)Chapter 5: Synagogue Seats (New York & Philadelphia, 1793-1818)Chapter 6: The Material of Race (London, 1815-17)Chapter 7: Voices of Rebellion (Bridgetown, 1818-24)Chapter 8: A Woman Valor (New York, 1817-19)Chapter 9: This Liberal City (Philadelphia, 1818-33)Chapter 10: Feverish Love (New York, 1819-1830)Chapter 11: When I am Gone (New York, Barbados, London, 1830-1847)Chapter 12: Legacies (New York and Beyond, 1841-1860) EpilogueAppendix: Family TreesAbbreviationsBibliographyNotes

Once We Were Slaves most definitely "works." It is a book one needs to dive into, step back from, and then reread as the story of this far-flung multiracial family begins to emerge ... Leibman has done a remarkable job of evoking time and place in a vast Atlantic world in which identities were made and remade ... Her discussion of pandemics has an eerily contemporary ring as she reminds us that they are nothing new -- and neither are our responses to them.