Booknotes: Linking the Histories of Slavery

New Arrival:
• Linking the Histories of Slavery: North America and Its Borderlands edited by Bonnie Martin and James F. Brooks (School of Advanced Research Pr, 2015).

The volume employs a multi-disciplinary approach (with contributions from anthropology, history, psychology, and ethnic studies scholars) to the study of slavery in North America and the commonalities among its slave cultures. "The contributors explore the links between indigenous customs of coercion before European contact, those of the tumultuous colonial era, some of the less-familiar paradigms of slavery before the Civil War, and the hazy legal borders between voluntary and involuntary servitude today. The breadth of the chapters complements and enhances traditional scholarship that has focused on slavery in the colonial and nineteenth-century South, and the contributors find the connections among the many histories of slavery in order to provide a better understanding of the many ways in which coercion and slavery worked across North America and continue to work today."