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Illustration of a giant tree in a swamp

The Hidden and Eternal Spirit of the Great Dismal Swamp

For nearly all of its modern existence, the Great Dismal Swamp has been excluded from U.S. history. Now there’s a push to bring its significance to light.
Cleveland-Stevenson Tariff Reform Portrait Handkerchief

Tax Regimes

Historian Robin Einhorn reflects on Americans’ complicated relationship to taxes, from the colonial period through the Civil War to the tax revolts of the 1980s.
Portraits of African American men revealed under torn copy of the Dred Scott Case.

The Painful, Cutting and Brilliant Letters Black People Wrote To Their Former Enslavers

The letters show a desire for freedom and a desperate longing to be reunited with their families.
Illustration of West Ford with laborers working fields in the background, by John P. Dessereau

Did George Washington Have an Enslaved Son?

West Ford’s descendants want to prove his parentage—and save the freedmen’s village he founded.
Edit of Grammarly language change suggestions

Why Grammarly’s New Language Suggestions Miss the Mark

Slavery’s a sensitive subject, but so is the question of who gets to be an authority about language.
Four duplicate portrait photos of Judah P. Benjamin.

Biographical Fallacy

The life of Judah Benjamin, a Southern Jew who served in the Confederate government, can tell us only so much about the American Jewish encounter with slavery.
Pastoral landscape with classical architecture. Copy after Thomas Cole’s “Dream of Arcadia”, by Robert Seldon Duncanson, 1852.

An Ugly Preeminence

On the devout abolitionists who excoriated American exceptionalism.
A migrant from Haiti prays with a Bible on her head during a Mass at an improvised refugee shelter in Ciudad Acuña on Sept. 21.
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In Its Early Days, the United States Provided Haven to People Fleeing Haiti

Extending that compassion today could reverse past wrongs.

Modern-day Culture Wars are Playing Out on Historic Tours of Slaveholding Plantations

Romanticized notions of Southern gentility are at odds with historical reality as the lives, culture and contributions of the enslaved are becoming integral on tours.
A mural depicting the portrait of Ahmaud Arbery, on the side of a building.
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Trial of Arbery's Killers Hinges on Law that Originated in Slavery

Georgia enacted the Citizen's Arrest Law in an attempt to maintain control of enslaved people.
Dual circular images of fire, representing seeing fire through the eye holes of a klan hood

Sins of the Fathers

In Life of a Klansman, Edward Ball’s white supremacist great-great-grandfather becomes a case study in the enduring legacy of slavery.
Painting of British soldiers surrendering their arms to George Washington.

The Yorktown Tragedy: Washington's Slave Roundup

History books remember Yorktown as a "victory for the right of self-determination." But the battle guaranteed slavery for nearly another century.
1836 lithograph of a slave trader marching enslaved people to be sold.

Partners in Brutality

New books investigate the brutality of the internal slave trade by focusing on businesses, and examine the role of white women in enslaving Black people.
Group portrait, "Elihu Yale With Members of His Family and an Enslaved Child," 1719.

Who Is the Enslaved Child in This Portrait of Yale University's Namesake?

Scholars have yet to identify the young boy, but new research offers insights on his age and likely background.
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.
Joe Biden

How Joe Biden Became Irish

The president has skillfully played up his Irish roots, but the story of his ancestry is more complicated.
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.
Side profile of Julia Grant

Julia Dent Grant’s Personal Memoirs as a Plantation Narrative

Her memoirs contribute to the inaccurate post-Civil War memory of the Southern plantation.
John Marshall Harlan and Robert James Harlan

The Black Hero Behind One of the Greatest Supreme Court Justices

John Marshall Harlan's relationship with an enslaved man who grew up in his home showed how respect could transcend barriers and point a path to freedom.
The plough, the loom and the anvil book drawing

In the Common Interest

How a grassroots movement of farmers laid the foundation for state intervention in the economy, challenging the slaveholding South.
A Slavers of New York sticker pasted over a Bergen Street subway sign.

Mapping the History of Slavery in New York

A group of activists is calling attention to the legacy of slavery encoded in the names of New York City’s streets and neighborhoods.
Photographs of Kim Lee Finger and Michelle Brooks

Two Women Researched Slavery in Their Family. They Didn’t See the Same Story.

Trying to learn more about a woman named Ann led her descendants to confront a painful past; ‘I just wanted to know the truth.’
Historian and scholar Robert Bellinger outside the Buckman Tavern in Lexington. The town’s Historical Society has launched a study of the presence of enslaved people during the Revolutionary War in Lexington. JONATHAN WIGGS/GLOBE STAFF

Lexington Confronts History of Slavery in Liberty’s Birthplace

Some of the same Lexington townspeople who took up arms to fight for freedom on April 19, 1775, were slave owners. And one of them was enslaved.
An eagle with a snake in its beak with the words "the eagle of liberty" over it.

Texas Secession: Whose Tradition?

The Texan secessionists are at it again.
John Jay painting

Slavery as Metaphor and the Politics of Slavery in the Jay Treaty Debate

The manner in which the debate unfolded is a reminder of the ways slavery affected everything it touched.
A small wooden house with smoke rising from the roof, framed by bright red and green fall foliage and green grass.

Graves of Enslaved People Discovered on Founding Father's Delaware Plantation

A signee of the U.S. Constitution, John Dickinson enslaved as many as 59 men, women and children at one time.
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.
Rev. Timothy McDonald III in First Iconium Baptist Church
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Attacking Sunday Voting is Part of a Long Tradition of Controlling Black Americans

The centuries-long battle over Sunday activities is really about African Americans' freedom and agency.
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 former slave interviewed by the Federal Writers' Projects

Stories of Slavery, From Those Who Survived It

The Federal Writers’ Project narratives provide an all-too-rare link to our past.

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