Ramin Ganeshram, author of A Birthday Cake for George Washington: “It goes without saying that these and other enslaved people were not happy to be enslaved. It goes without saying that their lives were harder and crueler than we could possibly imagine … Nonetheless, Hercules did not fit the ‘norms’ of his time. … To say that [he] couldn’t have done certain things or lived a certain way because others who suffered under the criminal institution of slavery did not, is simply not historically true.”