Community Library

While you await our forthcoming publications, we invite you to explore what other scholars have been saying about the history of enslavement in New York and the Bronx. 

The Community Library hosts a curated collection featuring foundational texts, recent scholarships, archival guides, and public history projects that inform and shape the Bronx Hidden Histories project.  

This reading list reflects the collective labor of historians, archivists, community researchers, and public scholars who have made it possible to study these histories with greater clarity and care. We see this library not only as a resource, but as an invitation to read deeply, to question inherited narratives, and to situate the Bronx within broader histories of Atlantic slavery and Black life in the North. 

Explore the collection below and join us in continuing the work of historical recovery.  

Bronx Hidden Histories Community Library 

Bronx Hidden Histories Research Abstracts  

Abstract 2024-2025: 

This collection of papers interrogates the structural and ideological underpinnings of slavery in colonial New York, challenging the common misconception that slavery was solely a Southern institution. The documents and analyses reveal how slavery in the North was deeply embedded in the legal, economic, and social frameworks of everyday life. Key themes include the commodification of human beings, the legal codification of ownership through wills and court cases, and the use of enslaved labor as a mechanism for wealth accumulation and generational transfer. Public records such as wills demonstrate how enslaved individuals were cataloged alongside land and livestock, reinforcing their status as property. Legal battles over escaped enslaved people reveal how colonial courts prioritized economic loss over human freedom, further normalizing the dehumanization of Black bodies. Reflections on runaway advertisements, estate inventories, and judicial proceedings illuminate how slavery in the North was not peripheral but central to the functioning of elite colonial households and institutions.