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...
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....
“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...
“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...
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...
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...
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...