New Books In Law

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 shaping the histories of enslaved people. The documentary archive was not simply a by-product of the business of slavery, but also a necessary tool that enslavers used to exploit the people they enslaved. Building on Montalvo's analysis of more than 18,000 sets of court records, Enslaved Archives is a close study of what we can and cannot learn about enslaved individuals from the written record. By examining five lawsu