I’ve just finished reading The Hemingses of Monticello, a fascinating look into the lives of the enslaved family so intimately connected with Thomas Jefferson. Annette Gordon-Reed does an excellent job resurrecting the history of an extensive family whose story has been buried for centuries under a version of history that champions the life and legacy of Jefferson while largely ignoring the enslaved people who made the life and legacy possible. She portrays Sally Hemings, as well as her children, siblings, and grandchildren, as the individuals they were, with highly individual interior lives, aggressively debunking the notion–too often supported by both the apologists for and critics of slavery–that slaves were a group with one mind.

My reading of Gordon-Reed led me to Andrew Ward’s recent book, The Slaves’ War: The Civil War in the Words of Former Slaves , a retelling of the civil war through the eyes of enslaved Americans, gleaned from hundreds of diaries, memoirs, interviews, and letters.

It is too easy to see slavery as an entirely historical event. The Huffington Post has recently been covering the modern-day tragedy of child slaves in America and around the world.

Around one-third of the estimated 10,000 forced laborers in the United States are servants trapped behind the curtains of suburban homes, according to a study by the National Human Rights Center at the University of California at Berkeley and Free the Slaves, a nonprofit group. No one can say how many are children, especially since their work can so easily be masked as chores.

Once behind the walls of gated communities like this one, these children never go to school. Unbeknownst to their neighbors, they live as modern-day slaves…