Jonathan D. S. Schroeder, literary historian, recovered a first-person slave narrative written by John Swanson Jacobs buried in the archives in Austraila. Jacobs is described as “radical abolitionist, sailor, and miner,[who]has a life story that is as global as it is American.” The brother of Harriet Jacobs, author of the widely known Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), was born into slavery then fled the U.S. The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots contains Jacobs’s first-person narrative and a full-length, nine-generation biography of Jacobs and his family by Jonathan D. S. Schroeder.