title: American Slavery: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
author:  Heather Andrea Williams 
description: <br /><strong>Heather Andrea Williams</strong> is Presidential Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of <em>Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery</em>, and <em>Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom.</em><br />
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  **_THE AMERICAN SLAVE COAST_** offers a provocative vision of US history from
  earliest colonial times through emancipation that presents even the most
  familiar events and figures in a revealing new light.
  
  
  Authors Ned and Constance Sublette tell the brutal story of how the slavery
  industry made the reproductive labor of the people it referred to as “breeding
  women” essential to the young country’s expansion. Captive African Americans
  in the slave nation were not only laborers, but merchandise and collateral all
  at once. in a land without silver, gold, or trustworthy paper money, their
  children and their children’s children into perpetuity were used as human
  savings accounts that functioned as the basis of money and credit in a market
  premised on the continual expansion of slavery. Slaveowners collected interest
  in the form of newborns, who had a cash value at birth and whose mothers had
  no legal right to say no to forced mating.
  
  
  This gripping narrative is driven