A young student receives a family tree assignment in school, but she can only trace back three generations. Grandma gathers the whole family, and the student learns that 400 years ago, in 1619, their ancestors were stolen and brought to America by white slave traders. But before that, they had a home, a land, a language. She learns how the people said to be born on the water survived.

    In spite of their attraction and for reasons unknown to Rose, Andre distanced himself from her. As the years passed, she remained a spinster, making a monotonous, although worthwhile life, by working at the library and keeping house for her brother. Then Marty dies, leaving her practically destitute. Andre Bellaire is living what he calls his third life--the first being his childhood and youth as part of a wealthy Creole family in New Orleans, his lonely middle years as a successful manufacturer in New York, and his later years as a philanthropist in the small town of Sweetwater Springs, Montana. In spite of a weak heart, he's savoring life, living with his newfound daughter and her family, while designing a library, a park, and helping to fund a new church. Then his comfortable routine is disrupted by a letter from his best friend Marty saying he’s dying and asking Andre to take care of his sister--the woman he once loved. Andre offers Rose the job of librarian in Sweetwater Springs and a room in his home. Not wanting to deter Rose from accepting the job, he doesn’t relate the library is only land and architectural plans, and the physical structure has yet to be built. Although Rose is shocked to find the job isn’t what she expected, the challenges of her new life prove stimulating. Still she guards her heart against Andre, not wanting the devastating hurt that would come from loving him and once again being rejected. Even if Andre could change Rose’s mind about a relationship, he holds back. The former barriers to their love no longer matter. But new ones do--at least for him. Can love bloom again in the winter of their lives?

    Ruthlessly torn from her family to be beaten, chained, degraded, and enslaved in a heartless world she can barely comprehend. The slave ledger at Virginia’s Belle Grove Plantation only reveals that Judah was purchased to be the cook, gave birth to 12 children, and died in April 1836. But, like the other 276 faceless names entered in that ledger, Judah lived. Brian C. Johnson’s important work of historical fiction goes beyond what is recorded to portray the depth, humanity, and vulnerability of a beautiful soul all but erased by history. For Judah, as Johnson notes, “did the ultimate—she survived. Not as a weakling, but resilient and determined.”

    When a political refugee from South Africa joins forces with an English agricultural expert, the time-honoured subsistence-farming method and old ways of life are challenged.

    Her only hope of surviving is to travel to America, a land of freedom and opportunity, and reunite with her brother in Baltimore. There she'll find new challenges, and perhaps, if she can put her painful past behind her, a new chance for love and lasting happiness.

    Not only does the young hero, José, have to fight the ignorance and poverty of plantation life, but he must also learn to survive the all-pervasive French cultural saturation--to remain true to himself, proud of his race and his family. His ally in this struggle is his grandmother, M'man Tine, who fights her own weariness to release at least one child from the plantation village, a dirt street lined with the shacks of sugarcane workers. First published in 1950, La rue cases-nègres was inspired by Richard Wright's Black Boy. "Everything in it is autobiographical," wrote Zobel, "but the story was patterned after my own aesthetics of composition." The movie adaptation, honored at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, has been released in the U.S. as Sugar Cane Alley.

    Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide.Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development.Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams's study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that set the tone for future studies.In a new introduction, Colin Palmer assesses the lasting impact of Williams's groundbreaking work and analyzes the heated scholarly debates it generated when it first appeared.

    Now she has returned, a strong, independent, and compassionate woman, and she’s brought with her a flock of unwanted and orphaned children she’s collected the way other women gather flowers by the roadside to raise as her own on her remote farm.Joe Condie is intrigued by this tough, independent woman and her boys and, after numerous rejections, finally wins Faith’s resistant heart. But with Joe's marriage proposal, Faith feels vulnerable all over again. Faith has forgiven and healed from the terrible wounds of her past, and she wants to be Joe's wife, but not until she can trust him with her darkest secret.When Faith gets up the courage to reveal what happened in her past and that the man who caused her troubles is still freely walking around Mustang, Joe must find it in himself to forgive and let go of his anger before it drives a wedge between him and the love he’s fought so hard to win.