Jonathan Wells

"Everyone had a clearer vision of my body than I did. It didn't feel as if my body was really mine." At fourteen-years-old, Jonathan Wells weighed just 67 pounds, igniting a scrutinizing persecution of his body that followed him into adulthood.As a boy in preparatory day school in upstate New York in the 1970s, Wells's teacher abuses and humiliates him for his size, forcing Wells, for the first time, to question his right to take up space in the

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With a fresh take on social dynamics in the antebellum South, Jonathan Daniel Wells contests the popular idea that the Old South was a region of essentially two classes (planters and slaves) until after the Civil War. He argues that, in fact, the region had a burgeoning white middle class--including merchants, doctors, and teachers--that had a profound impact on southern culture, the debate over slavery, and the coming of the Civil War.Wells shows...

"Although slavery was outlawed in the northern states in 1827, the illegal slave trade continued in the one place modern readers would least expect, the streets and ports of America's great northern metropolis: New York City. In 'The Kidnapping Club,' historian Jonathan Daniel Wells takes readers to a rapidly changing city rife with contradiction, where social hierarchy clashed with a rising middle class, Black citizens jostled for an equal voice...