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Louis Agassiz

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Black-and-white photograph of Louis Agassiz sitting in chair, looking through a magnifying glass at a sea urchin.

Louis Agassiz, Under a Microscope

The two prevailing historical visions of Louis Agassiz — one gentle and reverential, the other rigid and bigoted — may simply be two sides of the same coin.
Table of illustrations of various diverse human faces from "Ethnographic Tableau."

Baffled by Human Diversity

Confused 17th-century Europeans argued that human groups were separately created, a precursor to racist thought today.
Collage of plantation logbooks superimposed over photos of enslaved people.

A Racist Scientist Commissioned Photos of Enslaved People. One Descendant Wants to Reclaim Them.

There's no clear system in place to repatriate remains of captive Africans or objects associated with them.
Artwork by Alanna Fields of an enslaved individual.

The Dark Underside of Representations of Slavery

Will the Black body ever have the opportunity to rest in peace?
Painting of white men taking enslaved Africans off boat on a beach.

Who Owns the Evidence of Slavery’s Violence?

A lawsuit against Harvard University demands the return of an ancestor’s stolen image.

Creationism, Noah’s Flood, and Race

For centuries, literalist interpretations of the Book of Genesis have fueled scientific racism and white supremacy.
Portrait of Jane Stanford, circa 1855.

A Poisonous Legacy

Two new books reveal the story of Stanford University’s early years to be rife with corruption, autocracy, incompetence, white supremacy, and murder.
Painting of ships in Boston Harbor.

Pressured to Leave

Black refugees’ journey from Virginia to Boston after the Civil War.
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.
A gate opening to the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Mass.

Harvard Leaders and Staff Enslaved 79 People, University Finds

The school said it had benefited from slave-generated wealth and practiced racial discrimination.

The Planet is Burning Around us: Is it Time to Declare the Pyrocene?

Wild, feral and fossil-fuelled, fire lights up the globe. Is it time to declare that humans have created a Pyrocene?
Unidentified African American soldier in Union uniform with wife and two daughters.

Race in Black and White

Slavery and the Civil War were central to the development of photography as both a technology and an art.

Bad Blood

The history of eugenics in the Progressive Age.
U.S. soldiers in the Civil War.

Expanding the Slaveocracy

The international ambitions of the US slaveholding class and the abolitionist movement that brought them down.