A good place to start if you are interested in the history of slavery in North America,Davis's book is an apt summary tracing the roots of slavery and the abolitionist movement. Davis believes that racism caused the enslavement of the African people and explains the opinions and arguments of several other prominant historians on the subject.

Most interestingly, Davis's book makes it clear that slavery had not been considered an unusual practice. Misery, suffering, violence and death had been a regular condition of mankind for thousands of years.
The abolition of slavery had been inconsistent with history and a suprising and relatively strange development in the history of mankind.

Davis ends his history of the slave trade in the 20th Century and includes some interesting observations on the new South and a revisionist perspective of the Civil War. In the 1920s, President Wilson held a huge service to celebrate those who had died in the Civil War on both sides. The two sides had finally made peace and their glory could be celebrated. Not a single African American attended the event as an esteemed guest or veteran, but the majority of the workers who had installed the hundreds of portable toilets, toiled to put up the huge scaffolding structures and preformed the numerous, necessary, blue collar tasks to stage such a magnificant event had been black. Ending slavery had only scratched the sufface of the deeper and more elusive issue of racism.