"Of the hundreds of logbooks and journals I have examined, this is the most valuable for the slave trade in western Africa.... Mouser's] exhaustive background research and editing are exemplary." --George Brooks

Captain Samuel Gamble's log contains the record of a slaving venture to Africa and Jamaica that nearly failed. It is one of the best firsthand narratives of the slave trade to survive. Bruce Mouser's faithfully transcribed and carefully annotated edition of Gamble's log provides a haunting perspective on slave trading at the end of the 18th century. Gamble was captain of the...

More than one hundred years before Barack Obama, George Edwin Taylor made presidential history. Born in the antebellum South to a slave and a freed woman, Taylor became the first African American ticketed as a political party s nominee for president of the United States, running against Theodore Roosevelt in 1904.
Orphaned as a child at the peak of the Civil War, Taylor spent several years homeless before boarding a Mississippi riverboat that dropped him in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Taken in by an African American farm family, Taylor attended a private school and eventually rose to...