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...
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...
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...
“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...
“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...
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...
“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...
Guest Post by Calvin Schermerhorn It’s useful to view the ordeals of Solomon Northup in light of modern human trafficking. At first blush, the nineteenth-century odyssey of an African American New Yorker kidnapped and sold into chattel slavery under...