Maria R. Montalvo, "Enslaved Archives: Slavery, Law, and the Production of the Past" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

New Books in African American Studies · Sep 9, 2025 · 1h 22m

Explores the relationship between the production of enslaved property and the production of the past in the antebellum United States. It is extraordinarily difficult for historians to reconstruct the lives of individual enslaved people. Records--where they exist--are often fragmentary, biased, or untrue. In Enslaved Archives: Slavery, Law, and the Production of the Past (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024), Maria R. Montalvo investigates the legal records, including contracts and court records, that American antebellum enslavers produced and preserved to illuminate enslavers' capitalistic motivations for…