For one hundred and sixty-nine years, a first-person slave narrative written by John Swanson Jacobs—brother of Harriet Jacobs—was buried in a pile of newspapers in Australia. Jacobs’s long-lost narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, is a startling and revolutionary discovery. A document like this—written by an ex-slave and ex-American, in language charged with all that can be said about America outside America, untampered with and unedited by white abolitionists—has never been seen before. A radical abolitionist, sailor, and miner, John Jacobs has a life story that is as global as it is American. In this talk, Schroeder will consider how truth-telling—which Michel Foucault links to the ancient concept of parrhesia, or “fearless speech”—assumes a modern form in John Jacobs’s writing as a style that constitutes at once a radical denunciation of American injustice and a spectacular performance of autobiographical freedom.