Slave

He was one of the first great chefs of Philadelphia - in fact, of the young nation. The chief cook in President George Washington's home here in 1790 had only one name: Hercules. In the mansion's open-hearth kitchen, where elaborate banquets were prepared, where spitted meats sizzled and "fricaseys" simmered in cast-iron pans over hickory fires, underlings scurried to execute the orders of Hercules, "the great master-spirit," according to one account, who seemed to be everywhere at once.

Caleb Deschanel's haunting new version of the story of Robinson Crusoe arrives today with a conspicuous absentee that makes this a weekend without Friday. As soon as the storm-tossed vessel founders on the reef, we realize that one of the rats deserting the sinking ship in Crusoe is none other than Crusoe himself. Deschanel has moved Daniel Defoe's timeless consideration of man, nature and civilization forward by a century and turned Crusoe into an American slave-trader. In this revisionist reading, Crusoe is an unsympathetic figure forced by adversity and circumstances to reconsider his moral failings.

As an English teacher, I reencounter my "frugality heroes" every year. When Ben Franklin quotes Proverbs 22:7, "The borrower is slave to the lender," in The Way to Wealth, I not only listen - I obey. But not many Americans do. It's the dream, of course, to buy Versailles on a corner lot with three-car garages, turrets, atriums, and cathedral ceilings. In contrast, my house is a twin on a postage-lot, but my two daughters each have a bedroom and share a bathroom. With recession warnings, I'm quite happy with my $702 mortgage.

Shhh. Listen closely. Do you hear faraway waves slapping against a ship? What about the faint chattering of children? Do you hear anything anymore about the vessel that disturbed the waters off West Africa, whose cargo was children sold into slavery? No? Such silence is unacceptable. Two months have passed since a brief international spotlight fell on a ship called the Etireno, turned away by two nations because it was being used for child trafficking. The world waited to see whether the ship would be found, whether the children aboard were safe.

Britney Spears paid a visit to the First Union Center on Monday night, and the runway show did not disappoint. The pop princess opened with a beguiling little number in sequined black, reminiscent of an Elvis jumpsuit, but showing more skin than the King would have dared. Sequins were the theme of the concert, delicately balanced by an abundance of midriff and cleavage. Halfway through the collection, Spears paraded around in a hat that easily could have doubled as a dark-chocolate cake topped with strawberry frosting.

A collection of rare slave hire badges and an extensive gathering of colonial coinage will be highlights of the Stack's auction Sept. 8 and 9 at the Park Central Hotel, Seventh Avenue at 56th Street, during the New York Numismatic Convention. The appearance of 14 slave hire badges are a graphic reminder of the practice of urban slave owners who hired out slaves for work as maids, fishermen, mechanics, carpenters and fruit sellers. Several Southern cities passed ordinances governing the practice, and many required the slaves to wear hire tags.

The 20-year-old woman sighed in relief, then sobbed into the shoulder of her boyfriend. She had just watched a jury convict David Pepe, a security guard, of making her his "sex slave" for three days in his Kensington home in December 1997. The panel deliberated for only 45 minutes. After yesterday's verdict on charges of rape, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, kidnapping and related offenses, Common Pleas Judge Renee Cardwell Hughes deferred sentencing until tomorrow.

Leonard Weaver realized pretty quickly after his Comcast SportsNet interview aired Tuesday that fans weren't getting the message he had intended to send. In referencing and agreeing with the statement of Vikings running back Adrian Peterson that owners looked at the locked-out players as "slaves," Weaver set off a backlash that flooded his Twitter account. Yesterday, after apologizing via Twitter, the Eagles fullback made the media rounds, trying to explain himself. Weaver said he wanted to draw a parallel between workers who feel powerless when treated arbitrarily and NFL players, whose huge salaries might make them seem immune to such treatment.

In the 1840s, Benjamin "Big Ben" Jones of Baltimore was a fugitive slave living in Bucks County. The mountainous Jones - nearly seven feet tall, according to historical accounts - made friends in the region, but in 1844, he was caught by his slave master and forced to return to Maryland. Those friends from Buckingham, however, helped him return. After raising about $700, they bought Jones' freedom, bringing him back to Bucks County, where he lived until his death. Jones' dramatic life has been recounted in books and historical exhibits, and now will be brought to the screen in The North Star , a biopic set to debut at theaters in Doylestown and Newtown this week.

DETROIT - A former tennis pro accused of fraudulently bringing four children from the African nation of Togo to the United States and forcing them to work as slaves in his Michigan home was sentenced Monday to more than 11 years in federal prison. Jean-Claude Toviave, who didn't apologize when provided the opportunity to speak at his sentencing hearing in Detroit, also was ordered to pay two of the children $60,000 each. Prosecutors asked U.S. District Judge Arthur Tarnow to sentence Toviave to the maximum sentence within the guidelines, and he did, handing down a 135-month sentence, with credit for about two years of time served.

The entire treatment of slavery in my junior high history books - crack sources of information that they were - consisted of one or two illustrations of nameless black people, in chains, standing on auction blocks or picking cotton. Nary a mention of who the enslaved were, how they felt about their lives, or whether they had any dreams or aspirations. What we were required to memorize was that Abraham Lincoln freed us. Now here we are, 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation (issued Jan. 1, 1863)

Federal authorities on Wednesday unveiled a sweeping racketeering indictment against the Philadelphia woman who allegedly enslaved mentally disabled adults to steal their benefit checks, adding hate-crime and murder charges that could expose her to the death penalty. The crimes outlined in the 196-count indictment against Linda Ann Weston and four others include much of the same depravity and sadism that first emerged when police found the dirty, emaciated victims locked in a Tacony basement in October 2011.

A version of this review appeared in Sunday's Arts + Entertainment section. Neck-deep into Quentin Tarantino's antebellum western Django Unchained , I had this mental image of the über-geek genre filmmaker tapping furiously on his laptop, beaming at the brilliance of every new piece of dialogue he's writ. For all I know, Tarantino works on a typewriter, or longhand on a legal pad (or dictates his copy to a Gal Friday in spike heels), but in any event, as the banter ping-ponged across the dining table in the plantation mansion of slave-master Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio, twirling his mustache)

Thomas Jefferson The Art of Power By Jon Meacham Random House. 493 pp. $35   Monticello perches on high ground outside Charlottesville, Va., an American version of Olympus, and its rarefied air contributes to the feeling of otherworldliness. From the serene design of the main house to the orderliness of the grounds, Thomas Jefferson's home is a magical place. Jon Meacham breathed a lungful of that atmosphere as he researched his effusive treatment of the most sainted of the Founders.

By William C. Kashatus One hundred fifty years ago Saturday, President Abraham Lincoln issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, stating his intention to free all slaves in the Confederate states that did not return to Union control by the first of the new year. None returned, and the order took effect on Jan. 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation made abolition a central aim of the war. It also presented the Religious Society of Friends with a fundamental conflict: how to further a longtime commitment to human equality without violating their historic Peace Testimony.

FORMER BLACK slave Benjamin Spaulding, who married a free Native American named Edith and went on to have 10 children and 83 grandchildren, lived to become a prosperous man for his time. But there's no way that Spaulding, born in 1773, could have envisioned what's about to take place in Philadelphia in his name. An estimated 400 family members will converge Friday on the Hyatt Regency Philadelphia at Penn's Landing for a gathering so well-organized that it rivals some professional conventions.

SALT LAKE CITY - A team of genealogists has found evidence that President Obama could be a descendant of an African slave - but not through the lineage of his black father, the most likely route researchers had followed and exhausted. The link, genealogists with Ancestry.com said Monday, came through an examination of his white mother's family history. "We were surprised and excited to make that connection," said Joseph Shumway, a member of the Utah-based Ancestry.com team. Obama's father was from Kenya and his mother was from Kansas.

On a frigid, moonlit night in 1860, four horse-drawn coaches pulled up at a small, two-room house in Westampton, Burlington County, and a dozen armed men got out. They were looking for Perry Simmons, a fugitive slave. But Simmons wasn't giving up without a fight. He grabbed two loaded guns and a sharpened logging ax, then climbed a narrow stairway - with his wife and children - to a garret, where he planned to make a stand. Family members yelled "murder" and "kidnappers" to attract the help of neighbors who came to their rescue with guns, knives, and axes that morning of Nov. 30, just months before the outbreak of the Civil War. The men of nearby Timbuctoo, a village with other runaways, drove off the slave-hunters at what became known as the Battle of Pine Swamp, and they were partly inspired by that confrontation to later take up arms as Union soldiers.