This collection of essays brings together leading experts on the history of Black women in Brazil and newly expands what we know about the subject. The essays take us through cities, plantations, and mining areas from the north to the south and across the eighteenth, nineteenth, and first decades of the twentieth century. Grounded in original research that draws from diverse sources and favors biographies, the book offers a broad and fascinating picture of the experiences of African women--those born in Africa and in Brazil, those captive and those emancipated--the first agents of the emancipated community of Africans, and their descendants in the diaspora.