These letters from Black Americans to the people who once controlled their lives show a desire for freedom and a desperate longing to be reunited with their families. By Gillian…
Read More
The Underground Railroad conductor’s understanding of botany, wildlife biology, geography and astronomy allowed her to guide herself and others to safety By Liza Weisstuch, Smithsonian — Harriet Tubman successfully navigated…
Toward the end of his life, Frederick Douglass served briefly as U.S. ambassador to Haiti. The disastrous episode reveals much about the country’s long struggle for Black sovereignty while always…
Scientists investigated whether genetic data collected from 50,000 volunteers lined up with historical shipping manifests. By Alex Fox, Smithsonian Magazine — A sweeping survey of more than 50,000 people’s DNA…
By Michael Burlingame, HNN — Six weeks after Lincoln’s death, Frederick Douglass described him as “emphatically the black man’s president, the first chief executive “to show any respect for the…
New books investigate the brutality of the internal slave trade by focusing on a single firm, Franklin and Armfield, and examine the role of white women in enslaving Black people….
For a century and more, the conventional wisdom about the evolution of the financial systems embodied in institutions like Lehman Brothers was that modern American capitalism was built not on…
The Legacy Museum, opening in October, lands at a time when racial violence is again on the rise and critical race theory is being used to prevent America’s racist past…
By Alexa Imani Spencer, Black Enterprise — A cemetery of enslaved Africans in Brazil has been discovered and turned into a museum after nearly 200 years. The cemetery site was…
By Kevin Waite, The Conversation — The history of American slavery generally conjures a set of familiar images: sprawling plantations white with cotton, gangs of enslaved African Americans stooped low…
By Lois Requist, Desert Sun — The receipt for the sale of a 9-year-old girl. That, and Derek Chauvin’s knee on George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes, got my attention. Until…
In the 20th century, the country issued reparations for Japanese American internment, Native land seizures, massacres and police brutality. Will slavery be next? By Erin Blakemore, History — The papers…
