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Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

The Poetics of Abolition

For poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, as for the Black Romantics, history is the repetition of anti-Black violence that has yet to be abolished.
Thaddeus Stevens

The Radicalism of Thaddeus Stevens

Thaddeus Stevens understood far better than most that fully uprooting slavery meant overthrowing the South’s economic system and challenging property rights.
Illustration of James McCune Smith, the African Free School #2, and the University of Glasgow

America's First Black Physician Sought to Heal a Nation's Persistent Illness

An activist, writer, doctor and intellectual, James McCune Smith, born enslaved, directed his talents to the eradication of slavery.
Prince Hall portrait

A Forgotten Black Founding Father

Why I’ve made it my mission to teach others about Prince Hall.
Artistic collage of black leaders surrounded by images associated with prohibition.

The Forgotten History of Black Prohibitionism

We often think of the temperance movement as driven by white evangelicals set out to discipline Black Americans and immigrants. That history is wrong.
Duncanson landscape painting

Robert S. Duncanson Charted New Paths for Black Artists in 19th-Century America

Deemed “the greatest landscape painter in the West,” he achieved rare fame in his day.
Portrait of Martin Delany in uniform

The Organizer’s Mind of Martin Delany

Why did the man known as the “father of Black nationalism” defect to the Democratic Party during Reconstruction?
Breakfast Room at Belle Grove Plantation in White Chapel, Louisiana

Troubled Indemnity

A history of the United States shifting the financial burden of emancipation onto enslaved people.

This Guilty Land: Every Possible Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln is widely revered, while many Americans consider John Brown mad. Yet it was Brown’s strategy that brought slavery to an end.
Erie Canal historical marker

The ‘Psychic Highway’ that Carried the Puritans’ Social Crusade Westward

Elements of the Puritans’ unique worldview were handed down for generations and were carried westward by their descendants, the people we call Yankees.
A Black enslaved woman holding a white child.

The Visual Documentation of Racist Violence in America

Before and during the Civil War, both enslavers and abolitionists used photography to garner support for their causes.

Can Biden Be Pushed Left?

History suggests that what you see on the campaign trail, or even in a candidate’s past record, is not always what you get from a president once in power.
Freedmen's memorial.

Of, By & For the Freedmen

On the aesthetics and history of the Freedman’s Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Abraham Lincoln

Why We Keep Reinventing Abraham Lincoln

Revisionist biographers have given us countless perspectives, from Honest Abe to Killer Lincoln. Is there a version that’s true to his time and attuned to ours?
Donald Trump.
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Trump’s 2020 Playbook Is Coming Straight from Southern Enslavers

Racism — not reformers demanding redress — is the source of American strife.

The Revolutionary Thoreau

Generations of readers have chosen to emphasize Thoreau's spiritual communion with Nature, but Walden begins with trenchant critique of “progress.”
William Lloyd Garrison

The Country That Was Built to Fall Apart

Why secession, separatism, and disunion are the most American of values.

The Douglass Republic

How today's protests are struggling to reclaim the vision of the great abolitionist leader.
Black Lives Matter demonstrators.
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A Long-Forgotten Holiday Animates Black Lives Matter

The movement for racial equality echoes the vision of the “August First Day” holiday.

The World’s Human Rights Convention and the Paradox of American Abolitionism

An inquiry into a utopian vision of abolitionism.
Illustration of a bald eagle menacing a black parent and child in front of what appears to be a government building

Circulating the Facts of Slavery

How the American Anti-Slavery Almanac became an influential best seller.

The Death of Hannah Fizer

Black people suffer disproportionately from police violence. But white skin does not provide immunity.
A portrait of David Ruggles, who opened the first black-owned bookstore in America, between two white men.

The First Black-Owned Bookstore and the Fight for Freedom

Black abolitionist David Ruggles opened the first Black-owned bookstore in 1834, pointing the way to freedom—in more ways than one.

Shopping for Racial Justice, Then and Now

Using one’s buying power to support causes one believes in and to effect change is not new.

One Week to Save Democracy

Lessons from Frederick Douglass on the tortured relationship between protest and change.

The Making of the Radical Republicans

How did the struggle for emancipation become a mass politics?
Photo of Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass: The Most Photographed American of the 19th Century

Be Woke presents Black History in two minutes (or so).

The Science of Abolition

On Hosea Easton’s and David Walker’s attempts to debunk scientific racism.
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A Founder of American Religious Nationalism

On Rousas Rushdoony's political thought and lasting influence on the Christian right.

Slavery Was Defeated Through Mass Politics

The overthrow of slavery in the US was a battle waged and won in the field of democratic mass politics; a battle that holds enormous lessons for radicals today.

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