Person

Harriet Jacobs

Author of "Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl"

Related Excerpts

Portrait of an elderly Harriot Jacobs.

I Was Determined to Remember: Harriet Jacobs and the Corporeality of Slavery’s Legacies

How a folklorist encourages people to experience the past and present of a place.
Portrait photograph of Harriet Jacobs as an older woman

Incidents in the Life of Harriet Jacobs

A virtual tour of "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl."
Nell Irvin Painter.

Nell Irvin Painter’s Chronicles of Freedom

A new career-spanning book offers a portrait of Painter’s career as a historian, essayist, and most recently visual artist.
Laura Bush and Michelle Obama.
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Why Laura Bush Speaking Up on Separating Families Matters So Much

The language that has long been critical to covertly mobilizing activism.
Julia Ann Jackson, age 102, whose narrative was recorded by the WPA, 1937-1938.

Demanding to Be Heard

African American women’s voices from slave narratives to #MeToo.

Why A 19th Century American Slave Memoir Is Becoming A Bestseller In Japan's Bookstores

Why "Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl" by Harriet Ann Jacobs (1861), became a hit in Japan when it was published there in 2013.
Adolphe Duperly’s painting depicting the destruction of the Roehampton Estate in Jamaica during the Baptist War in January 1832.

For Enslaved People, the Holiday Season Was a Time for Revelry – and a Brief Window to Fight Back

The week between Christmas and the new year offered a rare opportunity for enslaved people to reclaim their humanity.
Tina Turner singing on stage

America Loved Tina Turner. But It Wasn’t Good To Her.

Over the course of her 83 years, the megawatt star that was Tina Turner kept telling us who she was in the hopes that we would see her — all of her.
Black and white photo of Lydia Maria Child reading a book

Living in Words

A new biography explores the work of the influential abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, who wrote about the social, political, and cultural issues of her time.
Headstones in Mount Auburn cemetery. Photograph by Daderot at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18003519.
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A Tour of Mount Auburn Cemetery

Two centuries of New England intellectual history through the lives and ideas of people who are memorialized there.
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.
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.
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.

Black Women’s 200 Year Fight for the Vote

For two centuries, black women have linked their ballot access to the human rights of all.

The Epidemics America Got Wrong

Government inaction or delay have shaped the course of many infectious disease outbreaks in our country.

Five Myths About Slavery

No, the Civil War didn’t end slavery, and the first Africans didn’t arrive in America in 1619.
A circa 1830 illustration of a slave auction in America. Rischgitz/Hulton Archive—Getty Images.

'The Slaves Dread New Year's Day the Worst': The Grim History of January 1

New Year's Day used to be widely known as "Hiring Day" or "Heartbreak Day"

The Mistress's Tools

White women and the economy of slavery.

In the Dismal Swamp

Though Donald Trump has made it into a catchphrase, he didn’t come up with the metaphor “drain the swamp.”

Jefferson and Hemings: How Negotiation Under Slavery Was Possible

In navigating lives of privation and brutality, enslaved people haggled, often daily, for liberties small and large.