Saidiya Hartman

Saidiya Hartman’s unrelenting exploration of slavery and freedom in the United States first appeared in 1997 and has lost none of its relevance.

Saidiya Hartman’s "Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments" is a strike against the archives’ silence regarding the lives of Black women in the shadow of slavery.

If there’s anything the 2010s taught us, it’s that there is no getting these stories right, no honoring with grace the dead and ghosts.

In Coates's debut novel, he sets out to recover the struggles for emancipation that have been lost to the past.

We might say that these books are recording a life with music, and that they are worth listening to.

Unearthing the beauty in the wayward, the fiction in the facts, and the thriving existence in the face of a blanked out history.

How historians have understood Africa and the Black diaspora in global conversations about race and identity.

The kinds of narratives historians tend to fall back on constrain our ability to imagine alternatives to the way things have been, and to the way things are.

Rustin’s assessment of the lay of the political land was predicated on a no-nonsense understanding of the radicalism of the moment.

Attacking presentism as a mindset of younger scholars doesn’t solve any of the historical profession's problems.

Enslaved women’s experiences with war must be extended to include the everyday warfare of slavery.

The banjo did not exist before it was created by the hands of enslaved people in the New World.

"A lot has been hidden from Black Americans. And so there is always a longing to know who you are and where you come from.”

"History​ is written by the victors, but diligent and continual silencing is required to maintain its claims on the present and future."

The poet’s memoir Generations is both a chronicle of her ancestral lineage and lesson in the centrality of Black women to the story of American history.

Scholarly accounts of slavery have been changing, but these correctives sometimes say more about historians than the historical subjects they're writing about.

The ambitious Times endeavor reveals the difficulties that greet a journalistic project when it aspires to shift a founding narrative of the past.

The murderous hysteria over white patrimony is inseparable from the private capture of both economic opportunity and political authority.

A new creative history comes closer than ever to giving us access to Turner’s visionary life.

The daughter of Buddy Holly's bandmate reflects on the defensiveness some white people have about the roots of rock 'n' roll.