Brenda E. Stevenson is the Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women’s History at Oxford and the Nickoll Family Endowed Chair of History at UCLA. Her previous works include What is Slavery? and the prize-winning monographs Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South and The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender and the Origins of the L.A. Riots.

• Introduction: The Black Family in the Public Imagination: What’s Slavery and Slavery Scholarship Got to Do with It?BeginningsChapter One: Traditions from Whence They Came: Marriage and Family in Western/Central Africa at the Time of the Atlantic Slave TradeChapter Two: The Colonial Slave Family: Foundations and CreationsChapter Three: Traditions of Resistance and FamilyThe Antebellum Familial ExperienceChapter Four: Antebellum Courtship and Marital RitualsChapter Five: Antebellum Family LifeChapter Six: Death and ResurrectionConclusion: Bob Samuels’ American Family

This remarkably concise history of family among the enslaved explores diverse family practices from the 17th century through Reconstruction. Its title comes from a Phillis Wheatley poem expressing the trauma of family formations among enslaved persons. Captors set arduous conditions of compulsory labor, torture, sexual violence, and forcible relocation as ongoing structural challenges to family formation and maintenance. This tension between the desires of enslaved persons to create family and the power of captors to exploit and destroy it shapes the book's six splendidly written chapters. Stevenson exquisitely deploys the biographies of specific enslaved persons to illustrate her deeply researched thesis about family diversity and resilience, reflecting differing cultural legacies imported from the African continent to the differing colonial and antebellum societies in the US. These range from the well-known sagas of Wheatley and Elizabeth Keckley to less familiar stories such as that of Chloe Spear. Splendidly contextualizing her argument within the evolving historiography and the persistent stereotype of the Black family as defective and dysfunctional, Stevenson demonstrates not only the centrality of family in the African American experience but also the resilience and resistance of African American actors across time. Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.