How a cotton sack and a mother’s love outlasted slavery

Harvard historian Tiya Miles writes a different kind of history in her prize-winning book, All That She Carried. Rather than basing her work on official records of slaveholders, she turns to a physical artifact: a cotton sack with the embroidered first names of an enslaved mother and her daughter, who was sold at age nine. Tiya told IDEAS: “Love is at the centre of this story.”