Growing Up In Slavery

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Summary: What life was like for slave children enslaved from birth
Review: Sylviane Diouf's Growing Up In Slavery (1763-5) provides almost a hundred pages of facts on what life was like for slave children enslaved from birth. Chapters cover life in both north and south, as well as the changes brought by freedom.

Rating:
Summary: a nice resource for teachers
Review: This book was a wonderful resource for my 6th grade Social Studies class. My students were very powerfully moved by the descriptions of how slave chidren were treated, how children lived, and how children the same as as them were asked to perform adult tasks. My students were particularly struck by the fact that slave babies were left under trees to fend off the snakes and mosquitos alone. Some of the "toughest" kids in my class were shocked and disturbed by the detailed and specific descriptions in this book. This is a fast, yet powerful read and was a wonderful supplement to my textbook.