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Illustrations from Twelve Years a Slave, by Solomon Northup, 1853, depicting an African American man hugging his family.

A Dark Cloud over Enjoyment

Refusing myths of joy and pain in slave narratives.
William Wells Brown

William Wells Brown, Wildcat Banker

How a story told by a fugitive from slavery became a parable of American banking gone bad.
Abraham Lincoln speaking to a crowd.

Stop Making Sense

Are the truths in the Declaration of Independence really self-evident?
Left: Longfellow in His Study, by Worth Brehm, c. 1912. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Right: Dante Meditating on “The Divine Comedy”, by Jean-Jacques Feuchère, 1843.

As Far From Heaven as Possible

How Henry Wadsworth Longfellow interpreted Reconstruction by translating Dante.
Photo of Jefferson Davis

The Southern Slaveholders Dreamed of a Slaveholding Empire

Antebellum slaveholders weren't content with an economic and social system based on trafficking in human flesh in the South alone.
Luther Martin
partner

For Constitution Day, Let's Toast the Losers of the Convention

Anti-federalist Luther Martin's agenda failed at the Constitutional Convention, but his criticisms of the Founders may still resonate with us today.
Artwork by Alanna Fields of an enslaved individual.

The Dark Underside of Representations of Slavery

Will the Black body ever have the opportunity to rest in peace?
Depiction of an agricultural fair with crowds of people gathered around exhibit halls.

Slavery, Technology and the Social Origins of the US Agricultural State

Ariel Ron discusses the rise of the agricultural state in his book, Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic.
Photo of Union commanders.

The Anti-Lee

George Henry Thomas, southerner in blue.
Boats moored in the water in front of a row of houses on the beach. Photo by Amani Willett.

Nantucket Doesn’t Belong to the Preppies

The island was once a place of working-class ingenuity and Black daring.

Black Women and American Freedom in Revolutionary America

The relationship between enslaved women and the Revolutionary war.
Lithograph of two men shooting one man on the ground

The Young America Movement and the Crisis of Household Politics

In the 19th century, freedom from government interference mapped onto opposition of women's rights.
Tucker Carlson wearing a t-shirt with a photograph of Abraham Lincoln on it.

The Right May Be Giving Up the “Lost Cause,” but What’s Next Could Be Worse

The GOP’s new embrace of Lincoln, emancipation, and Juneteenth is no sign of progress.
A painting entitled Our Town, with Black children playing on a suburban street

The Truth About Black Freedom

This year’s Juneteenth commemorations must take a deeper look at the history of Black self-liberation to understand what emancipation really means.
Black men and women in Hilton Head, South Carolina, after the Civil War.

The United States' First Civil Rights Movement

A new history charts the radical agitation around Black rights and freedom back to the early nineteenth century. 
Walmart Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith As Lieutenant General Of The Nauvoo Legion

The Fallacy of Religious Freedom

When the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith ran for president, he wasn’t seeking further glory but a policy change in religious liberty.
African American mother and children in peach vignette, c. 1885.

A Mother’s Influence

How African American women represented Black motherhood in the early nineteenth century.
John Quincy Adams giving speech at U.S. House of Representatives
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Why a Culture War Over Critical Race Theory? Consider the Pro-Slavery Congressional "Gag Rule"

In 1836, the House passed a resolution that automatically tabled all petitions on slavery without a hearing.
Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln’s Rowdy America

A new biography details the cultural jumble of literature, dirty jokes, and everything in between that went into the making of the foremost self-made American.
Harriet Tubman.

Harriet Tubman’s Lost Maryland Home Found, Archaeologists Say

The famed abolitionist’s father, Ben Ross, sheltered her and family on the Eastern Shore in the 1840s.
Portrait of Walt Whitman.

How the American Civil War Gave Walt Whitman a Call to Action

Mark Edmundson on the great American poet as a defender of democracy.
An map of the U.S. in 1857

Lessons From the Civil Rights Struggle That Began Before the Civil War

The path to equality in the free Northern states was inconceivably steep. But in time, the movement maneuvered from the margins into mainstream politics.
engraving of Harriet Beecher Stowe
partner

A Forgotten 19th-Century Story Can Help Us Navigate Today’s Political Fractures

Reconciliation is good — but not at any cost.
Tattered Texas state flag

An Honest History of Texas Begins and Ends With White Supremacy

One Texas Republican state House member wants to create a “patriotic” education project to celebrate the Lone Star State—and whitewash its ugly past.
New York in 1865, a slave ship, silhouette of Sanchez, and a page from Sanchez's notes.

How a Cuban Spy Sabotaged New York's Thriving, Illicit Slave Trade

Emilio Sanchez and the British government fought the lucrative business as American authorities looked the other way.
A view looking up at the Statue of Liberty

Immigration: What We’ve Done, What We Must Do

Once, abolitionists had to imagine a world without slavery. Can we similarly envision a world where migrants are offered justice?
A home in Paramus, New Jersey.

Slavery's Legacy Is Written All Over North Jersey, If You Know Where to Look

New Jersey was known as the slave state of the North, and our early economy was built on unpaid labor.
Photograph of a newsstand selling magazines

What Are Magazines Good For?

The story of America can be told through the story of its periodicals.
John C. Calhoun

American Heretic, American Burke

A review of Robert Elder's new biography of John C. Calhoun.
Book cover for Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

Chernow Gonna Chernow

A Pulitzer Prize winner punches down.

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