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
Zora Neale Hurston is one of the greatest literary and anthropologist treasures in American history, despite her dying completely forgotten and in poverty in 1960. Her 1931 novel Barracoon is finally
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,
This is the grave of Harriet Jacobs. I will start this by saying that anyone who has not read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl needs to do so immediately. This is a slave narrative with as much p
It’s President’s Day, but rather than focus on the presidents themselves this year, how about we think about all the people who have made the presidency work over the years? And by this, I
This is the grave of James Birney. Born in 1792 in Danville, Kentucky to Irish immigrants, Birney’s family was torn on the issue of slavery. He had abolitionist family members. His father also o
Good essay from historian Daina Ramey Berry on the horrible 19th century trade in human bodies you don’t know about: the cadaver trade. There was plenty of weird cadaver trading of white bodies
Every now and then, someone wonders in comments why I obsess about the Civil War and referring to it as Treason in Defense of Slavery, a term it should be noted that originated on the internet at LGM,