Indentured servants first arrived in America in the decade following the settlement of Jamestown by the Virginia Company in 1607. The idea of indentured servitude was born of a need for cheap labor.

Washington (CNN)When slavery was outlawed in the US in 1865, the 13th Amendment included one exception. "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party ...

In 1624, Jane Dickenson petitioned the governor of Virginia for relief from bondage. Four years earlier, her husband had signed a contract of indenture to pay for his immigration from England; it ...

Indentured servitude was not uncommon in pre-Revolutionary American history. In fact, during one decade historians estimate that almost half the European immigrants arriving were indentured. That was ...

The Wall Street Journal ran a post over the weekend about a new credit crunch among low income borrowers, noting it is now 'payback time.' What they didn't go into is that their primary interviewee is ...

We sometimes imagine that such oppressive laws were put quickly into full force by greedy landowners. But that's not the way slavery was established in colonial America. It happened gradually -- one ...

Northam said he is "still learning and committed to getting it right" Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam is facing backlash yet again after he referred to slaves as “indentured servants” in a recent ...

Hundreds of years ago, poor immigrants were forced to become indentured servants to repay the cost of their passage to the U.S. by performing years of hard labor. This practice lives on for U.S.

Voters in five states on Tuesday were asked whether to update their states’ constitutions to remove slavery and indentured servitude as potential punishments. Although the 13th Amendment to the US ...

Norfolk, Va. – Historians say they were “shocked” and “mystified” when Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam wrongly used the term “indentured servants” Sunday in reference to the first Africans to arrive in ...

SAN FRANCISCO – A San Francisco Italian Consulate employee and his wife have been charged with turning a Brazilian woman into an indentured servant after luring the woman to the United States with ...

African artists hired by a Korean museum have been laboring under conditions "similar to indentured servitude," South Korean newspaper the Hankyoreh reports. Their allegations about the circumstances ...