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).
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 Today, tens of millions of people worldwide remain enslaved but many scholars choose to ignore their plight and instead wring their hands about...
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...
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...
“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...
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...
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...
On Saturday, October 10, 2015, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. hosted an important and energizing event in the history of antislavery in the 21st century. Stacy Jewell Lewis, a survivor of 2 years’ worth of being trafficked as...
Board Member Robert E. Wright presented a talk on slavery at Augustana College on February 12, 2015. What follows is his manuscript from the speech. If you would like to learn about having a Historians Against Slavery supporter speak...
by Jason Allen, HAS Board Member Recently I had a "war of emails" with my daughter’s 1st grade teacher. My daughter told me that her teacher said George Washington "didn’t own slaves when he was young" and didn’t want...
Historians Against Slavery co-director Stacey Robertson recently wrote a helpful post on antislavery organizing on campus on the End Slavery Now blog. Here’s an excerpt. One of the largest antislavery groups to emerge before the Civil War was one...
What do nineteenth-century abolitionist Parker Pillsbury and his twentieth-century biographer have in common? They both crossed the Atlantic on an antislavery mission. In this dispatch, cross-posted from her blog, HAS co-director Stacey Robertson reflects on our new efforts to...