The grave with the cracked stone is the grave of Robert Finley. Born in 1772 in Princeton, New Jersey, Finley grew up pretty well off. His parents had come from Scotland and his father was in the yarn trade. Yarn and whatever else made enough...
slavery
This is the grave of John Armfield. One of the most disgusting human beings to ever live in this country, Armfield was born in 1797 in North Carolina, His parents.
This is the grave of Pierce Butler. Born in 1744 in Garryhundon, County Carlow, Ireland, Butler grew up in the Protestant elite ruling over Ireland with less than a mild.
On August 28, 1833, the Slavery Abolition Act received royal assent from King William IV, providing for the gradual emancipation of slavery in the British Empire. Like every other European colonial power, the British relied on slavery for its labor force. That was true throughout...
This is the possible grave of Solomon Northup. Born sometime around 1807, Northup was born free, in Minerva, New York. This would be central to the horrors he experienced later.
In recent years, discussions of Eli Whitney have noted that despite claims that he "invented" the cotton gin, it was almost certainly the slaves of the Rhode Island revolutionary hero.
On May 23, 1861, three slaves named Shepard Mallory, James Baker, and Frank Townsend fled to Fort Monroe, Virginia, to escape their master. Benjamin Butler, the Massachusetts politician turned officer in command of the fort, declared them contraband and refused to return them. This maneuver...
For our latest podcast, we talked to Joshua Rothman, historian at the University of Alabama, about his recent book The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America..
"Cumberland Landing, Va. Group of "contrabands" at Foller's house"
On August 25, 1734, a slave insurrection in St. John was put down with maximum violence, ending nine months of hard-won freedom from slaves and concluding possibly the most important slave rebellion before the Haitian Revolution in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. However, this story is not...
The historian Kate Masur had a piece a bit ago about what we can learn from state-level battles over fugitive slave laws for our current abdication of the federal government.
On April 14, 1816, Bussa's Rebellion began in Barbados, when 5,000 slaves rose up against the evil system of slavery the British had placed them into, part of the broader.