Historians Against Slavery welcomes the guilty verdicts on all three counts in the trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. For the family, this is a moment of accountability and vindication, and for the country it...
Of the 40 million people worldwide living in slavery today, almost 15 million live in the Muslim world, which can be defined as all the Muslim-majority countries in the world and all countries with large Muslim minorities. In some...
Historians Against Slavery stands with those protesting the brutal murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, Eleanor Bumpers, and Alberta Spruill, along with the many other Black and Brown victims of police and vigilante violence in the United...
Christopher P. Momany is a former college professor and chaplain. He currently serves as pastor of First United Methodist Church in Dowagiac, Michigan. For three decades Chris has researched the arguments for and against slavery in America’s past. His...
By Robert E. Wright, Paul Coverdell Distinguished Visiting Fellow of Policy Studies, Georgia College, Fall 2020 The pandemic’s direct toll on the world’s 40 million or so modern slaves will never be known with certainty but will be disproportionately...
Historians Against Slavery board member Talitha LeFlouria, along with Daina Ramey Berry, wrote a short piece in the Washington Post exposing “Five Myths about Slavery.” Berry and LeFlouria chronicle the origins of Africans in the Americas prior to 1619,...
By Robert E. Wright, Nef Family Chair of Political Economy and Historians Against Slavery Treasurer With my history of Financial Exclusion in America hot off the presses, I recently turned my attention to global financial crises only to...
By Robert E. Wright, Nef Family Chair of Political Economy and Historians Against Slavery Treasurer As Anna Mae Duane and many others have shown, enslavers attempt to infantilize the enslaved to render them more amenable to working hard...
James Brewer Stewart is the James Wallace Professor of History, Emeritus at Macalester College. Stewart has written or edited thirteen books addressing the problem of slavery’s abolition and is the founder of Historians Against Slavery. This article originally ran at the History...
By Elizabeth Swanson and James Brewer Stewart, co-editors of Human Bondage and Abolition: New Histories of Past and Present Slaveries (Cambridge University Press, 2018) How should historians respond when pressed to explain how and why it has come...
By Robert E. Wright, Nef Family Chair of Political Economy and Historians Against Slavery Treasurer Today, tens of millions of people worldwide remain enslaved but many scholars choose to ignore their plight and instead wring their hands about...
Historians Against Slavery is delighted to present this roundtable on Richard Blackett’s magisterial new work The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery. Blackett’s work is the latest entry in the Slaveries...
The Lepers in Our Heads Chris Momany, Adrian College Have you come here for forgiveness? Have you come to raise the dead? Have you come here to play Jesus To the Lepers in your head? Bono/U2 It is a...
The role of exonerees from death row, like Clarence Brandley, in contemporary anti-death penalty efforts mirrors the role that former and fugitive slaves, like Frederick Douglass, played in efforts to abolish slavery. By Bharat Malkani, Cardiff University It has...
Slavery, Then & Now: A Reading List By Dr. Elizabeth Swanson & Dr. James Brewer Stewart Plantation Slavery and Abolition, and Their Legacies in the Americas Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of...
How the African Slave Trade Helped to Stymie African Financial Development By Dr. Robert E. Wright Economists Ross Levine, Chen Lin, and Wensi Xie have put out an important new paper that unfortunately resides behind the pay wall of...
Yet Another Reason to Visit Vermont By Dr. Robert E. Wright If you are a leaf-lover, a hunter of sea monsters, a maple syrup addict, or love staying in classic B&Bs or taking scenic ferry rides, Vermont is already...
“Thoughts on Teaching: Why Modern Slavery Belongs in a History of Slavery” By Dr. Sara Lampert, University of South Dakota It was drizzling, threatening to rain, but that stopped no one. Students streamed across the quad to the coyote...
Disney, “Pirates of the Caribbean,” and Human Trafficking By Michael Todd Landis On June 29, 2017, the Walt Disney Company announced on its Disney Parks Blog that dramatic changes were coming to the beloved (and inspiration for five blockbuster...
It’s Time for Historians of Slavery to Listen to Economists By Dr. Keri Leigh Merritt Due to the extremely alarming rise of Donald Trump, the American public is once again questioning the political beliefs and actions of lower-class whites....
The End of College and the Community of Ends By Rev. Dr. Christopher P. Momany A long time ago, on a balmy spring evening in 1986, I was...
“Numberless, Diverse Acts of Courage and Belief: The Struggle Against Slavery in History and in the Present” Dr. Aidan McQuade, Director, Anti-Slavery International Delivered on 23 February 2017 in Barnard’s Inn Hall, Gresham College, London. It is two years since, as...
“Enslaved Children, ‘Rescue Fantasies,’ and the Problem of ‘Innocence’” by Dr. Anna Mae Duane Donald Trump, at some point during his visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, was shown a pair of manacles designed...
“Twice Punched in the Gut“ By Dr. Robert E. Wright Whenever I hear anyone earnestly claim that slavery is/was good for the economy, I feel like I have been punched in the stomach, twice. That is because I’m...
“Ravine to Freedom is Journey to Self” By Rev. Dr. Christopher P. Momany What we learn about ourselves along life’s path is as important as what we learn about history. In fact, the two belong together. Historians and activists...
The Lost Cause? Teaching the U.S. Civil War in 2016 By Dr. Thomas Balcerski Browse the ever-burgeoning corridors of the internet this time of year, and you will be sure to encounter a popular meme. Two images form...
The Scholarship of HAS Board Members Historians Against Slavery is composed of scholar-activists. As dedicated as we may be to combating human trafficking and battling unfree labor in all its forms, we are first and foremost historians. Our approach...
The Election and Historians Against Slavery. A special message from HAS founder James Brewer Stewart Dear Friends of HAS, “We are re-living Germany in 1936….It feels as if someone l love dearly has suddenly died . . . ....
“Black Freedom Fighters on the Silver Screen” by Dr. Peter H. Wood, Emeritus Professor of History, Duke University A quarter century ago, teaching a Native American History class at Duke, I noted that enrollment spiked after the release of...
“Learning from the Legal Culture of Gradual Emancipation, or, Misled by the Thirteenth Amendment” by Dr. Hendrik Hartog Post originally appeared on Progress: A Blog for American History. Re-posted with permission of the author and editor. For some historians, the...
“Mapping Memories of Enslavement”: The French Confront Their Own History By Dr. Mattie Fitch Like all European countries, France has a long history of participating in slavery, from slave labor in France’s colony of Saint Domingue that ultimately produced...
Art for Abolitionists: How I Joined the Fight Against Human Trafficking By Callen Buchanan [Ms. Buchanan is a high school student in Vinton, VA who organized a charitable event to raise money to combat human trafficking. Her event received...
Abolitionists are American Democracy’s Unsung Heroes By Dr. Manisha Sinha Most...
HAS-UK Kick-Off! Beginning in the era of the American Revolution, and even with the Quakers before that, the abolition movement was a transatlantic phenomenon. Whether in the era of Anthony Benezet and Granville Sharp or of William Lloyd Garrison...
Lincoln, the 13th Amendment, and the “Cure for All the Evils” By Dr. Christian Samito In his first public address after Congress passed a resolution proposing to the states a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery nationwide, President Abraham Lincoln...
The Dangers of a Fake Tubman Quote By Dr. W. Caleb McDaniel In 2008, at the height of the presidential primary contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the feminist...
The Policy Pundit’s Hippocratic Oath: Do No Harm By Dr. Robert E. Wright At their best, abolitionists and antislavery activists are essentially policy pundits because they want governments to change various policies that impact the costs and benefits associated...
“Right and Rationalization,” by Rev. Dr. Christopher P. Momany Recent years have witnessed much understandable examination of the slavery-laced legacies at several American colleges and universities. There are many reasons for this attention, and a number of these institutions...
“African American History at Risk in Richmond” By James Brewer Stewart, Macalester College Throughout the antebellum decades slaveholders delivered tens of thousands of “their” enslaved people to Lumpkin’s Slave Jail (aka. the Devil’s Half-Acre) located in Richmond, Virginia. Lumpkin’s was...
“Creating & Leading an Anti-Slavery Student Group: Notes from Texans For Freedom President Sarah Brown” By Sarah Brown, Tarleton State University In the fall of 2014, Dr. Michael Landis, Assistant Professor of History at Tarleton State University, taught a...
History Matters: Reflections on the Historians Against Slavery Conference By Dr. Nikki Berg Burin Originally published on the Rural Women’s Studies Blog. Re-posted with their permission. History matters. I say this to the students in my American history survey courses...
“Interdisciplinary Abolitionism and the Contemporary University: An Experiment,” by David C. Williard “I don’t see what Thai sex slavery has to do with African American emancipation,” a valued but blunt colleague said to me as we discussed how to...
I often tell people that I do what I do for the young adults around me and the folks up in the graveyard. There is no contradiction between grass-roots presence with college and university students and hard-nosed scholarship that...
By Rachel Hooper At Historians Against Slavery, we are assembling a list of colleges and universities with abolitionist ties in order to better understand the effect abolitionism had on colleges in the nineteenth century. This post reflects on my...
Watch former Historians Against Slavery co-director Matthew Mason interviews board member Ben Wright about Wright’s book Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism (LSU Press, 2020).
This book is more than a history of child trafficking in Nigeria. It offers an analysis of what I have termed the social economy of a child and answers the question: How can a child’s value be understood in...
Historians Against Slavery is happy to sponsor the Slaveries since Emancipation series with Cambridge University Press. In this post, HAS board member Ben Wright interviews Hannah-Rose Murray on her new book in the series, Advocates of Freedom African American...
Announcing a conference on “Mass Incarceration and Slavery” at Tougaloo College, October 11-12, 2019. The conference is co-sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Modern-Day Slavery at Tougaloo College and by Historians Against Slavery, with generous support from...
Hear Historians Against Slavery founder James Brewer Stewart on the Teaching Hard History Podcast from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Jim discusses modern-day slavery happening across the world—and right here in the U.S. – showing educators how to connect the past...
Conference call for papers Human Trafficking: Awareness and Action. This conference is a platform for faculty, university undergraduate and graduate students, and researchers from all disciplines to share original research on human trafficking, both awareness and action. Presentations...
By Robert E. Wright, Nef Family Chair of Political Economy and Historians Against Slavery Treasurer I confess that I recently jumped at the opportunity to teach my general education/gender studies course “Global Slavery 10,000 BCE to the Present”...