Fans pick 100 books like The Price for Their Pound of Flesh

By Daina Ramey Berry,

Here are 100 books that The Price for Their Pound of Flesh fans have personally recommended if you like The Price for Their Pound of Flesh. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home

Joshua D. Rothman Author Of The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America

From my list on the domestic slave trade.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have taught history at the University of Alabama since the year 2000, and I have been working and writing as a historian of American slavery for more than twenty-five years. It is not an easy subject to spend time with, but it is also not a subject we can afford to turn away from because it makes us uncomfortable. Slavery may not be the only thing you need to understand about American history, but you cannot effectively understand American history without it. 

Joshua's book list on the domestic slave trade

Joshua D. Rothman Why did Joshua love this book?

Because the buying and selling of enslaved people was enormously profitable and entirely legal in the United States before the Civil War, even free Black people lived in fear that they might be kidnapped, sold illegally as slaves, and never heard from by their friends and families again. Though many Americans are familiar with the experience of Solomon Northup, as relayed in his memoir Twelve Years a Slave and the film of the same name, Richard Bell demonstrates how kidnapping was widespread in the nineteenth century and how thin the line could be between freedom and slavery.

By Richard Bell,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Stolen as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This “superbly researched and engaging” (The Wall Street Journal) true story about five boys who were kidnapped in the North and smuggled into slavery in the Deep South—and their daring attempt to escape and bring their captors to justice belongs “alongside the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edward P. Jones, and Toni Morrison” (Jane Kamensky, Professor of American History at Harvard University).

Philadelphia, 1825: five young, free black boys fall into the clutches of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the United States. Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, they are…


Book cover of An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America's Domestic Slave Trade

Joshua D. Rothman Author Of The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America

From my list on the domestic slave trade.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have taught history at the University of Alabama since the year 2000, and I have been working and writing as a historian of American slavery for more than twenty-five years. It is not an easy subject to spend time with, but it is also not a subject we can afford to turn away from because it makes us uncomfortable. Slavery may not be the only thing you need to understand about American history, but you cannot effectively understand American history without it. 

Joshua's book list on the domestic slave trade

Joshua D. Rothman Why did Joshua love this book?

The domestic slave trade business was operated predominantly by white men, but the labor of Black women was critical to making it profitable. Here, Alexandra Finley recovers the stories of Black women who fed and clothed the enslaved in pens and jail, who kept the houses of slave traders, who were commodified for purposes of sexual slavery in the so-called fancy trade, and who sometimes even lived as the concubines and “wives” of traders. Putting enslaved women and their work at the center of the story yields an entirely new angle of vision on the trade.

By Alexandra J. Finley,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked An Intimate Economy as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Alexandra Finley adds crucial new dimensions to the boisterous debate over the relationship between slavery and capitalism by placing women's labor at the center of the antebellum slave trade, focusing particularly on slave traders' ability to profit from enslaved women's domestic, reproductive, and sexual labor. The slave market infiltrated every aspect of southern society, including the most personal spaces of the household, the body, and the self, Finley shows how women's work was necessary to the functioning of the slave trade, and thus to the spread of slavery to the Lower South, the expansion of cotton production, and the profits…


Book cover of Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade

Joshua D. Rothman Author Of The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America

From my list on the domestic slave trade.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have taught history at the University of Alabama since the year 2000, and I have been working and writing as a historian of American slavery for more than twenty-five years. It is not an easy subject to spend time with, but it is also not a subject we can afford to turn away from because it makes us uncomfortable. Slavery may not be the only thing you need to understand about American history, but you cannot effectively understand American history without it. 

Joshua's book list on the domestic slave trade

Joshua D. Rothman Why did Joshua love this book?

As the domestic slave trade became more expansive alongside the growth of the cotton economy, it attracted the increased ire of antislavery activists in the United States and England alike. Using sketches and paintings of the slave trade made by British artist Eyre Crowe in the 1850s as an entry point, Maurie McInnis explores the landscape of the slave trade in major American cities such as Richmond and New Orleans. In the process, she also opens a fresh window onto the world of transatlantic abolitionism.

By Maurie D. McInnis,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Slaves Waiting for Sale as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In 1853, Eyre Crowe, a young British artist, visited a slave auction in Richmond, Virginia. Harrowed by what he witnessed, he captured the scene in sketches that he would later develop into a series of illustrations and paintings, including the culminating painting, "Slaves Waiting for Sale", Richmond, Virginia. This innovative book uses Crowe's paintings to explore the texture of the slave trade in Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans; the evolving iconography of abolitionist art; and the role of visual culture in the transatlantic world of abolitionism. Tracing Crowe's trajectory from Richmond across the American South and back to London -…


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Book cover of The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever

The Coaching Habit By Michael Bungay Stanier,

The coaching book that's for all of us, not just coaches.

It's the best-selling book on coaching this century, with 15k+ online reviews. Brené Brown calls it "a classic". Dan Pink said it was "essential".

It is practical, funny, and short, and "unweirds" coaching. Whether you're a parent, a teacher,…

Book cover of The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860

Joshua D. Rothman Author Of The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America

From my list on the domestic slave trade.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have taught history at the University of Alabama since the year 2000, and I have been working and writing as a historian of American slavery for more than twenty-five years. It is not an easy subject to spend time with, but it is also not a subject we can afford to turn away from because it makes us uncomfortable. Slavery may not be the only thing you need to understand about American history, but you cannot effectively understand American history without it. 

Joshua's book list on the domestic slave trade

Joshua D. Rothman Why did Joshua love this book?

Much of the recent outpouring of books on the domestic slave trade is an outgrowth of revived debates about the historical relationship between slavery and capitalism in the United States. Calvin Schermerhorn draws that connection as tightly as any historian in recent memory, tracing the financial innovations generated by the trade and following the money around the country and across the Atlantic as a foundation for American economic growth was built on the backs of hundreds of thousands of enslaved people trafficked against their will.

By Calvin Schermerhorn,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Calvin Schermerhorn's provocative study views the development of modern American capitalism through the window of the nineteenth-century interstate slave trade. This eye-opening history follows money and ships as well as enslaved human beings to demonstrate how slavery was a national business supported by far-flung monetary and credit systems reaching across the Atlantic Ocean. The author details the anatomy of slave supply chains and the chains of credit and commodities that intersected with them in virtually every corner of the pre-Civil War United States, and explores how an institution that destroyed lives and families contributed greatly to the growth of the…


Book cover of Sister of Mine

Elizabeth Bell Author Of Necessary Sins

From my list on the human toll of American slavery.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am an American novelist and a lifelong, enthusiastic student of American history. To me, history is people. In addition to first-hand accounts and biographies, one of the best ways to understand those people is historical fiction. For the last two decades, I’ve lived in the Southern United States, surrounded by the legacy of slavery, America’s “peculiar institution” that claimed an unequivocal evil was a positive good. Because both the enslaved and their enslavers were human beings, the ways that evil manifested were as complex as each individual—as were the ways people maintained their humanity. These are a few of the novels on the subject that blew me away.

Elizabeth's book list on the human toll of American slavery

Elizabeth Bell Why did Elizabeth love this book?

The Jewish people have been persecuted—even enslaved—for millennia. One would hope this would make them more compassionate toward another persecuted and enslaved group, American Blacks. Unfortunately, this usually isn’t the way human nature works. To quote Frederick Douglass: “Everybody, in the south, wants the privilege of whipping somebody else.” If humans can get ahead by oppressing someone else, we too often do. With her fictional Jewish family and the Blacks they enslave—one of whom is also their blood kin—Waldfogel explores this terrible truth. A hundred and fifty years after its setting, this novel challenged me to be a better human.

By Sabra Waldfogel,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Sister of Mine as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

When two Union soldiers stumble onto a plantation in northern Georgia on a warm May day in 1864, the last thing they expect is to see the Union flag flying high-or to be greeted by a group of freed slaves and their Jewish mistress. Little do they know that this place has an unusual history.

Twelve years prior, Adelaide Mannheim-daughter of Mordecai, the only Jewish planter in the county-was given her own maid, a young slave named Rachel. The two became friends, and soon they discovered a secret: Mordecai was Rachel's father, too.

As the country moved toward war, Adelaide…


Book cover of No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation's Founding, With a New Preface

Randy E. Barnett Author Of A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist

From my list on slavery and the constitution.

Why am I passionate about this?

Reading about antislavery constitutionalism literally changed my life. Lysander Spooner’s 1845 book, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, which I discovered in the 1990s, exposed me to a version of “originalism” that would really work. This was also a version of originalism that was not just for political conservatives. This led me from being primarily a contract law professor to a constitutional originalist who would argue in the Supreme Court, develop the theory of originalism, and work to achieve an originalist majority of Supreme Court justices. By reading these five books, you, too, can become an expert on antislavery constitutionalism and our forgotten constitutional past.

Randy's book list on slavery and the constitution

Randy E. Barnett Why did Randy love this book?

In his book, Princeton historian Saul Wilentz completely alters our view of the American Founding. He tells the gripping story of how the antislavery forces at the Philadelphia convention, including crucially the Virginians, resisted the effort by some delegates from the Deep South to include an affirmative endorsement of human chattel slavery—the concept of property in man—in the text of the Constitution.

Such language would have contradicted the principles they’d adopted in the Declaration of Independence. Their success would later provide “constitutional abolitionists” like Salmon Chase and Frederick Douglass with crucial ammunition to advance their antislavery political program. 

By Sean Wilentz,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked No Property in Man as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"Wilentz brings a lifetime of learning and a mastery of political history to this brilliant book."
-David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year

Americans revere the Constitution even as they argue fiercely over its original toleration of slavery. In this essential reconsideration of the creation and legacy of our nation's founding document, Sean Wilentz reveals the tortured compromises that led the Founders to abide slavery without legitimizing it, a deliberate ambiguity that fractured the nation seventy years later. Contesting the Southern proslavery version of…


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Book cover of The Deviant Prison: Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary and the Origins of America's Modern Penal System, 1829-1913

The Deviant Prison By Ashley Rubin,

What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?

The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…

Book cover of Douglass' Women

Elizabeth Bell Author Of Necessary Sins

From my list on the human toll of American slavery.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am an American novelist and a lifelong, enthusiastic student of American history. To me, history is people. In addition to first-hand accounts and biographies, one of the best ways to understand those people is historical fiction. For the last two decades, I’ve lived in the Southern United States, surrounded by the legacy of slavery, America’s “peculiar institution” that claimed an unequivocal evil was a positive good. Because both the enslaved and their enslavers were human beings, the ways that evil manifested were as complex as each individual—as were the ways people maintained their humanity. These are a few of the novels on the subject that blew me away.

Elizabeth's book list on the human toll of American slavery

Elizabeth Bell Why did Elizabeth love this book?

Escaping slavery doesn’t make you a saint. Even Frederick Douglass, one of the world’s most famous former slaves, one of history’s greatest writers, orators, and human rights activists, had feet of clay. His wife Anna was a free Black woman who helped him escape bondage and bore him five children. Yet Frederick cheated on her in a decades-long affair with a White German woman—who is somehow equally sympathetic here. I finished this novel loving all three of these flawed, complex characters, all of whom were real people. Rhodes’s psychological insight leaves me in awe.

By Jewell Parker Rhodes,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Douglass' Women as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

WINNER OF THE 2003 PEN OAKLAND JOSEPHINE MILES AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING WRITING AND THE BLACK CAUCUS OF THE ALA LITERARY AWARD
Frederick Douglass, the great African-American abolitionist, was a man who cherished freedom in life and in love. In this ambitious work of historical fiction, Douglass' passions come vividly to life in the form of two women: Anna Murray Douglass and Ottilie Assing.
Douglass' Women is an imaginative rendering of these two women -- one black, the other white -- in Douglass' life. Anna, his wife, was a free woman of color who helped Douglass escape as a slave. She…


Book cover of The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations On Cotton And Slavery In The American Slave States, 1853-1861

Marcia E. Herman-Giddens Author Of Unloose My Heart: A Personal Reckoning with the Twisted Roots of My Southern Family Tree

From my list on genealogy and racial justice for truth.

Why am I passionate about this?

I was introduced to genealogy, family pride, and racism as an only child. Growing up in Birmingham scarred me. Since young adulthood, I have worked on being an antiracist. I found that research on my ancestors, especially my maternal slaveholding side, helped me know my history, my family’s history as enslavers, my Black cousins, and what it means to be an American with all its flaws. I never tire of this research. It teaches me so much, has offered great gifts, and has built me a new family.

Marcia's book list on genealogy and racial justice for truth

Marcia E. Herman-Giddens Why did Marcia love this book?

I no longer remember how, around 2018, I discovered this remarkable 1850 travelogue and presentation of observations on slavery by the man most people know as a landscape architect. Before his landscaping, Olmstead was hired by the now New York Times to travel the South interviewing and recording all he could from whites, whether rich or poor, slave owners or not, and enslaved Blacks. An added treasure: I loved reading about his travel experiences by boat, horse, train, and stagecoach, as well as the challenges of finding places to overnight. 

The horrors of slavery come through without any preaching. I still think about this book a lot and what I learned from it–aspects of Southern life in the 1850s presented by someone trying to be fair and observant without a special agenda. 

By Frederick Olmsted,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Cotton Kingdom as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) is best known for designing parks in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Chicago, Boston, and the grounds of the Capitol in Washington. But before he embarked upon his career as the nation's foremost landscape architect, he was a correspondent for the New York Times , and it was under its auspices that he journeyed through the slave states in the 1850s. His day-by-day observations,including intimate accounts of the daily lives of masters and slaves, the operation of the plantation system, and the pernicious effects of slavery on all classes of society, black and white,were largely collected in The Cotton…


Book cover of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African

Vincent Carretta Author Of Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man

From my list on recover early Black Atlantic lives.

Why am I passionate about this?

When I decided to familiarize myself with eighteenth-century authors of African descent by editing their writings, I didn’t anticipate becoming their biographer. In annotating their writings, I quickly became intrigued and challenged by trying to complete the biographical equivalent of jigsaw puzzles, ones which often lack borders, as well as many pieces. How does one recover, or at least credibly speculate about, what’s missing? Even the pieces one has may be from unreliable sources. But the thrill of the hunt for, and the joy of discovering, as many pieces as possible make the challenge rewarding. My recommendations demonstrate ways others have also met the biographical challenge.

Vincent's book list on recover early Black Atlantic lives

Vincent Carretta Why did Vincent love this book?

Equiano’s autobiography fascinated me when I stumbled upon a paperback edition of it in a local bookstore nearly thirty years ago.

A bestseller during Equiano’s lifetime, his Interesting Narrative is appreciated as a work of enduring historical and literary value. The odyssey he recounts takes him from enslavement as a child in Africa to becoming a leading figure in the struggle to abolish the transatlantic slave trade.

Along the way, he serves in the British Royal Navy, gains his freedom, participates in a scientific expedition to the Arctic, has a religious conversion, observes various kinds of slavery in North and Central America, England, Europe, and the Middle East before agreeing to help administer settling in Africa formerly enslaved poor Blacks who had joined the British forces during the American Revolution.

By Olaudah Equiano,

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African, first published in 1789, is the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano. The narrative is argued to be a variety of styles, such as a slavery narrative, travel narrative, and spiritual narrative. The book describes Equiano's time spent in enslavement, and documents his attempts at becoming an independent man through his study of the Bible, and his eventual success in gaining his own freedom and in business thereafter.

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano was one of the first widely read slave narratives. Eight editions…


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Book cover of Who Is a Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption

Who Is a Worthy Mother? By Rebecca Wellington,

I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…

Book cover of Survivors of Slavery: Modern-Day Slave Narratives

Seth Mallios Author Of Born a Slave, Died a Pioneer: Nathan Harrison and the Historical Archaeology of Legend

From my list on confronting slavery and how it impacts society today.

Why am I passionate about this?

As an archaeologist, anthropologist, and historian who has worked on both the East Coast (Flowerdew Hundred and Jamestown, Virginia) and West Coast (San Diego, California) of the U.S. and dug sites from the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, I am passionate about how archaeology can serve to offer new insights for marginalized peoples in American history. I specialize in exposing how narrow thinking, revisionism, and myth-making warp local histories and turn them into fabrications of the present. 

Seth's book list on confronting slavery and how it impacts society today

Seth Mallios Why did Seth love this book?

Laura Murphy uses nearly forty survivor narratives from around the world to demonstrate that slavery is not a heinous phenomenon of the past, but of the present as well. Her work is essential to students of American history; it ensures that slavery is never presented as merely a crime of the past or only as a despicable practice isolated to one geographic region.

By Laura T. Murphy,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Survivors of Slavery as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Slavery is not a crime confined to the far reaches of history. It is an injustice that continues to entrap twenty-seven million people across the globe. Laura Murphy offers close to forty survivor narratives from Cambodia, Ghana, Lebanon, Macedonia, Mexico, Russia, Thailand, Ukraine, and the United States, detailing the horrors of a system that forces people to work without pay and against their will, under the threat of violence, with little or no means of escape. Representing a variety of circumstances in diverse contexts, these survivors are the Frederick Douglasses, Sojourner Truths, and Olaudah Equianos of our time, testifying to…


Book cover of Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home
Book cover of An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America's Domestic Slave Trade
Book cover of Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade

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