Barbara J. Fields

Black identity is a reality, not an idea.

Historian Barbara J. Fields explains why you can't understand what happened in 1619 without understanding what happened in 1607.

The landmark Ken Burns documentary hasn’t aged well. But it continues to shape American perceptions about the Confederacy and slavery.

The documentary's accommodation of the Lost Cause narrative may have left viewers with a skewed understanding of the conflict.

Race is a social fiction imposed by the powerful on those they wish to control.

A new book makes the case for a more pragmatic anti-policing movement—one that seeks to build working-class solidarity across racial lines.

Exploring recent debates about the uses–and utility–of Black history in both the academic and public spheres.

The “racial” distinctions between master and slave may be more familiar to Americans, but they were and are no more real than those between Gentile and Jew.

Political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. discusses his new memoir.

What gets lost when we view the American past as primarily a story about capitalism? 

If colorblindness rests on the claim that the civil rights movement changed everything, the idea that racism is in our DNA borders on a fatalistic proposition that it changed nothing.

They’re good for kickstarting political debate but analogies with the past are often ahistorical and should be treated with care.

Two recent books put the reemergence of anti-immigrant sentiment in the Trump era into historical relief.

The Editor of the American Historical Review weighs in on recent historiographical debates around the New York Times' 1619 Project.

The success and brilliance of the new PBS series on Reconstruction is a reminder of the missed opportunity facing the nation.

Some white Northerners see a flag rooted in racism as a symbol of patriotism.

The Spotify and Ancestry partnership proposes to entertain users based on the narrowest possible conception of who they are.