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This book, published in 1878 (thirty-three years after Frederick Douglass' autobiography; seventeen years after Harriet Jacobs' narrative), is a white person's experience of the joys and benefits of American slavery. Today this counts as an easy target for indignation, but history is interesting and important.

A few actually good American books to compare and contrast with this one are:

• Incidents in the life of a slave-girl by Harriet Jacobs. An honest, intelligent, heartbreaking, and searing autobiography.


• Autobiography of Frederick Douglass - Douglass needs no introduction as one of the foremost thinkers, writers, orators, and activists of his age. Also, this was how he looked:

Imagine waking up on the 13th with this glorious image staring at you with blazing eyes.

• Works about George Washington Carver - inventor, educator, writer, philanthropist, born a slave.


• Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup - I haven't seen the movie but I have read the book; like Harriet Jacobs' book it's an imporant primary source.


• Up from Slavery by Booker T Washington - educator, orator, writer, political adviser, born a slave in Virginia, 'Wizard of Tuskegee'.


• Slave Narratives - Also important primary sources from a wide range of people, collected by the United States WPA (Work Projects Administration) (also an example of extremely useful government work in America during the Great Depression).


• Poetry of Phillis Wheatley - African-American slave and talented writer, the first published African-American woman and second published African-American person. She made a lot of classical, learned allusions in her poems and subtly wrote about the cruel fate of slavery.


• Ida B. Wells at Project Gutenberg. Wells wrote the works here in the 1890s, long after the war, but these works on lynching show the horror of murder and terrorism. Wells' straightforward, factual, flawless writing style presents irrefutable arguments in great detail.

Additionally, Fanny Kemble is another white woman who wrote a plantation memoir, except Kemble was actually observant and reasonable. For fear of negative reaction from racist people such as Burwell and her family, Kemble couldn't publish her story until long years after it was written - Kemble's memoirs were taken from 1838-9, and published in 1863.

Livejournal cut follows for quotes of particularly horrifying excerpts from Burwell's book.( Read more... )