Nevertheless, I e-mailed Molefi Kete Asante, the firebrand Afrocentric scholar at Temple University who has called for reparations to African-Americans for slavery. Asante didn't flame me. (Perhaps it helped that the first chapter of my book is going to be published in Harvard's Transition magazine, edited by Henry Louis Gates and Kwame Anthony Appiah.) In fact, Asante sent back a cordial note with a fiery but cogent message at the end: "Whatever the extent of white slavery, there were no auction blocks where whites were humiliated and treated like animals, there were no preachers saying that whites did not have souls, there were no biologists trying to prove that whites were like the lowest animals, there were no laws that would have put whites in slavery in perpetuity."

Whites were apparently sold on auction blocks, but Asante's larger point was dead-on: Traders stole some white bodies, but the philosophers of slavery denigrated the black soul. But why had this history gone unrecorded? There are several possible explanations: Slavery was overwhelmingly African-American, so that's where early scholarship was directed; the evidence of Anglo-Saxon captives was anecdotal; it was possible that some accounts of white slavery were abolitionist hype (though the abolitionists never pushed the issue and seemed almost embarrassed by it); miscegenation made very light-skinned slaves a common sight in the South, confusing the issue. And perhaps shame played a role as well; early historians may have been more comfortable overlooking evidence of whites selling their own.

If the scholars responded calmly, the reactions I got from friends and ordinary Americans were more heated. One African-American friend, Nia, a young woman from the South with a master's degree in American studies, threw up her hands. "Who cares?" she said. "It certainly doesn't compare to the millions and millions of Africans who suffered through the Middle Passage and were brutalized on foreign soil for generations and generations."

I was not suggesting that white slavery was comparable to black slavery; that would be absurd. And my interest in the subject was not exculpatory; I wanted to know how and why white slavery happened, how poor whites reacted to the kidnappings and what it all said about the culture. "It shows that our perceptions about race and slavery cannot be as rigid as we have wanted them to be," said historian Wilson. "Just as blacks could be free and landowners and prosperous, whites could be enslaved, even if it was a rare event."

But for many African-Americans, the subject touches a raw nerve. A few people I corresponded with questioned the motives of those bringing out this new evidence (including mine). "It smells of revisionism," wrote one member of an African-American message board on which I had posted a request for comments. For another, it confirmed old stereotypes: "It just shows the devious mind-set of white people. As the saying in the 'hood is, 'They'll sell out their momma for a dollar!'" Many of the responses I got from African-Americans were receptive to the idea of white slavery, even to the idea of including the accounts in written histories. "Slavery was utilized for primarily economic reasons," wrote a consultant to African-American social agencies. "If black folks hadn't been available, it could have very well been more of the poor white immigrants."

But some worried that the evidence would give white people an out for African-American suffering in slavery. "I can hear it now on 'Jerry Springer': 'Well, white people were slaves, too,'" Nia e-mailed me. "We hear it anyway, when folks talk about Sudanese slavery. Can Negroes get a damn apology first for that shit, before whites jump on the slave ship?"

White Americans, on the other hand, seemed not at all galvanized by the news. "Though I do consider slavery a tragedy, I do not feel any guilt for what my forefathers did," wrote one history buff from Iowa. "This has been going on since the beginning of time -- we have to get on with life and remember that the past is the past."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"