Gabriel Winant's long-form book review of Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. A brief excerpt: People, too, suffered the violence of abstraction. Over the first half of the 19th century, up to a million slaves were transported into...
slavery
Just in case you get into any causes of the Civil War discussion during Sunday barbecue with the in-laws or something. Here's E.S. Dargan's speech at the Alabama secession convention:.
Although I could do without the big sweeping Hollywood music in the trailer, Steve McQueen's adaptation of Solomon Northup's slave narrative 12 Years a Slave looks to be incredibly promising..
Does it go too far to compare stand your ground laws with slave patrols? Given the ability of George Zimmerman to slay a random nonthreatening black kid like Trayvon Martin with no consequence and the backing of the Florida legal system, it's an argument at...
On July 2, 1822, Denmark Vesey, a free African-American living in Charleston, South Carolina, was executed for his role in leading a purported slave rebellion. This event marked a significant.
Forbes is a terrible magazine in general, but now that it is reviving the idea that the tariff was the real reason for the Civil War, it's adding bad history.
Paula Deen, a racist wistfully desiring black slaves.
When we think of the Republican Party in its early years, we often think of it as a party of freedom because it opposed slavery. But that's way too simplistic.
It can't be stated often enough that slavery was inexorably tied with the rise of capitalism in the United States. Historian Walter Johnson: Without slavery, however, the survey maps of.
Christopher Cameron has an interesting post at the U.S. Intellectual History blog about George Washington's growing abolitionism. Historians ignored this side of Washington for a very long time, but in recent years, they have paid increasing attention to it. Washington certainly benefited from slavery and...
On December 6, 1865, the legislature of Georgia ratified the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, ending slavery. Arguably, the single most important event in the history of American labor, the.
This Henry Wiencek piece at Smithsonian on Thomas Jefferson's dark side has half-perplexed me, yet the reactions show why it is so necessary. The piece essentially argues that Jefferson was.