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 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...
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...
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 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...
“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...
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...
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...
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...
The history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century abolitionism is replete with lessons about what NOT to do.