To commemorate the 150th Anniversary of the end of the Civil War, Diversion Books is publishing seminal works of the era: stories told by the men and women who led, who fought, and who lived in an America that had come apart at the seams.

Among the first of slave narratives to be published, Harriet A. Jacobs led an extraordinary life, punctuated by the limitless hardship of slavery, made indelible by the sheer power of her words. In this narrative she writes candidly of the treatment she witness and endured as a slave, as well as her dramatic escape to freedom.