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Peanuts, bagged and ready for transport, are stacked in pyramids at Kano, Northern Region, Nigeria, 1955.

After Slavery: How the End of Atlantic Slavery Paved a Path to Colonialism

Abolition in Africa brought longed-for freedoms, but also political turmoil, economic collapse and rising enslavement.
engraving of a slave ship

Why Did the Slave Trade Survive So Long?

The history of the Atlantic slave trade after the American Revolution is a story of sustained efforts to suppress it even as demand for slaves increased.
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.
Repairs being made at the site of a water main break
partner

What Early American Infrastructure Politics Can Teach the Biden Administration

Infrastructure plans are always political. The key is being inclusive and focusing on the public good.
Graphic with images of 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.
Cotton Mather.

The Hellfire Preacher Who Promoted Inoculation

Three hundred years ago, Cotton Mather starred in a debate about treating smallpox that tore Boston apart.
A painting of a slave ship.

New York City and the Persistence of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Even after slave trade was banned, the United States and New York City, in particular, were complicit in allowing it to persist.
Lithograph of mansion, Stratford Hall, in Westmoreland County, VA

Oppression in the Kitchen, Delight in the Dining Room

The story of Caesar, an enslaved chef and chocolatier in colonial Virginia.
Engraving of a vaccinated child.

An Eradication: Empire, Enslaved Children, and the Whitewashing of Vaccine History

Enslaved children were used in medical trials for early smallpox vaccines. They have been forgotten.
School room in rural Cidra, Puerto Rico

On Language and Colony

A linguistic trajectory of Puerto Rico's identity as the world’s oldest colony.
Map of Boston from 1722.

This "Miserable African": Race, Crime, and Disease in Colonial Boston

The murder that challenged Cotton Mather’s complex views about race, slavery, and Christianity.

I Am a Descendant of James Madison and His Slave

My whole life, my mother told me, ‘Always remember — you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president.’

The Shortages May Be Worse Than the Disease

Over the centuries, societies have shown a long history of making the effects of epidemics worse and furthering their own destruction.
Caricature of Oscar Wilde in between a sunflower in a vase with the U.S. dollar symbol on it, and a lion with sunflower petals for a mane.

The Wilde Woman and the Sunflower Apostle: Oscar Wilde in the United States

Victoria Dailey looks back at Oscar Wilde’s wild ride through the United States in the early 1880s.
Skeletons in situ at Avery's rest.

DNA Analysis From Colonial Delaware Skeletons Reveals Beginning Of American Slave Trade

A new DNA study of skeletons from a farmstead on the Delaware frontier has revealed key information about the early transatlantic slave trade.
First Lady Grace Coolidge with the racoon that was meant to be dinner.

Why President Coolidge Never Ate His Thanksgiving Raccoon

A tradition as American as apple pie, and older than the Constitution.

The Symbolic Seashell

Collecting seashells is as old as humanity. What we do with them can reveal who we are, where we’re from, and what we believe.
partner

How the Kikotan Massacre Prepared the Ground for the Arrival of the First Africans in 1619

America was built by the labor of stolen African bodies, on stolen Native American lands.
partner

Freedom's Fortress

Exploring Virginia’s Fort Monroe – the place where slavery began in British North America, and where, during the Civil War, it began to unravel.

Historians Expose Early Scientists’ Debt to the Slave Trade

Key plant and animal specimens arrived in Europe on slavers’ ships

My Great-Grandfather, the Nigerian Slave-Trader

White traders couldn’t have loaded their ships without help from Africans like my great-grandfather.
Still from Black Panther film.

'Black Panther' and the Invention of 'Africa'

The film's hero and antagonist represent dueling responses to five centuries of African exploitation at the hands of the West.

Chronicling “America’s African Instrument”

The banjo's history and its symbolism of community, slavery, resistance, and ultimately America itself.
Sketch of tobacco cultivation at Jamestown.

The Other Founding

A review of two books exploring the importance and legacy of the founding of the English colony at Jamestown.

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