"Myne Owne Ground": Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1640-1676

Ever since its publication twenty-five years ago, "Myne Owne Ground" has challenged readers to rethink much of what is taken for granted about American race relations.
During the earliest decades of Virginia history, some men and women who arrived in the New World as slaves achieved freedom and formed a stable community on the Eastern shore. Holding their own with white neighbors for much of the 17th century, these free blacks purchased freedom for family members, amassed property, established plantations, and acquired laborers. T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes reconstruct a community in which ownership of property was as significant as skin color in structuring social relations. Why this model of social interaction in race relations did not survive makes this a critical and urgent work of history.
In a new foreword, Breen and Innes reflect on the origins of this book, setting it into the context of Atlantic and particularly African history.

• Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era)
• Manifest Destiny and American Territorial Expansion: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford Series in History and Culture)
• America: A Concise History, Volume 1
• The Classic Slave Narratives
• Charlotte Temple (Early American Women Writers)
• The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey
• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Dover Thrift Editions)
• Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America
• Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market
• Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper