<I>Heroines of the Slavery Era</I> weaves oral tradition, folk legends and stories, songs and poems, historical accounts, and personal writings from North and South America and the Caribbean, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century.<BR>    These women of the slavery era include Aqualtune, a princess from Congo enslaved in Brazil and the Caribbean, who led an army of ten thousand warriors in the Battle of Mbwila; Anastasia, an African slave in Brazil, who today is considered the patron saint of Brazil's blacks; Solitude, a slave in the French West Indies, the leader of the survivors of La Goyave and legendary in Guadeloupe to this day; Phillis Wheatley, a slave in Boston, a child prodigy and brilliant woman whose poetry is among the finest from the early American era; Harriet Tubman, heroine of the Underground Railroad who helped hundreds of other slaves escape to freedom in the United States and Canada; Ellen Craft, a slave who successfully escaped to Philadelphia with her husband; Sojourner Truth, famed orator on behalf of the rights of women and the abolition of slavery; and many others.