Books by Calvin (Arizona State University) Schermerhorn

Written as an introduction for undergraduate students, Unrequited Toil explores the history of American slavery from the American Revolution to post-Civil War Reconstruction. Personal narratives are used across twelve chronologically ordered chapters to explore themes such as politics, economics, labor, literature, rebellion, and social conditions.

Slaves focused their energy and attention, however, not on making money, as slaveholders increasingly did, but on keeping their kin out of the human coffles of the slave trade.