The daily horrors of the slave trade are just too much for us to quite comprehend. Here is a new discovery: In the early 15th century, Portuguese explorers like Henry the Navigator began sailing to Af
Vanessa Holden and Ed Baptist have a typically excellent article placing the recent spate of news stories about random white people calling the police on black people for doing basically nothing in th
I have a piece in the New York Times on the prison strike and the historical context of white coercion of black labor that has never ended. The Civil War may have ended chattel slavery, but the 13th A
One of the biggest weaknesses of any constitutional amendment is that of the 13th Amendment, allowing for unpaid labor by prisoners. Whether its writers thought through the potential repercussions of
I have no idea what bizarre world Kanye West is in, but the historian Tera Hunter speaks some real truth over the supposed “choice” that some freed slaves made to return to bondage. It is
Above: Slaves at a coffee yard in a farm. Vale do Paraiba, Sao Paulo, 1882 On May 13, 1888, Brazil abolished slavery. The last nation in the Western Hemisphere to do so, it brought to an end the funda
This looks really great: Readers of the May 24, 1796 Pennsylvania Gazette found an advertisement offering ten dollars to any person who would apprehend Oney Judge, an enslaved woman who had fled from
On April 6, 1712, a group of slaves gathered in Manhattan, setting fire to a building on Maiden Lane, near Broadway. When whites gathered to put out the fire, the slaves attacked with hatchets, guns,