Tag
Slavery
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Cloth and Complicity: Seth Rockman on Plantations, Textiles, and the Art of Weaving
“But I had found a set of instructions in the archives of one of New England’s leading manufacturers of low-end woollen cloth for enslaved wearers.”
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Tenuous Privileges, Tenuous Power
In “The Vice President’s Black Wife,” Amrita Myers paints freedom as a process in which Black women used the tools available to them to secure rights and privileges within a slave society.
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The U.S. Has Never Forgiven Haiti
For Frederick Douglass, and for Black activists across the United States, there was no place more important to global Black freedom than Haiti.
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How Haiti Destroyed Slavery and Led the Way to Freedom throughout the Atlantic World
Not the United States, Great Britain, France, or any other enslaver deserves credit for ending slavery. Atlantic abolition began with Haiti.
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B-Sides: Reading, Race, and “Robert’s Rules of Order”
The famous guidebook of rules, motions, and meetings has a darker history than you might think.
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Out of the Closet—and into the Coffin
Interview with the Vampire uses vampirism to reveal fantasies & fears of the social contagiousness of interracial & homosexual desires.
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Failure’s Gifts
Even the most successful authors—like Phillis Wheatley and W. E. B. Du Bois—fail to publish all they’d like. What can that reveal about literature?
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The Dawn of Scientific Racism
In the 1740s, Bordeaux developed some of the first modern theories of racial difference, even as the city profited from the slave trade.
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An Uncommon, Unconquerable Mind: Our Friend, Julius S. Scott III (1955–2021)
“Are there ways in which Black North Americans connected to places and things that were outside of the world we thought they were in?”
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Cuba & the US: Necessary Mirrors
Exponentially more enslaved Africans were forced to the lands that now make up Latin America rather than the United States. Where is their story?
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How to Live Among What Is Dead
“Octavia Butler teaches us,” explains Black playwright Ericka Dickerson-Despenza, “…that we have two options in Apocalypse: adapt or die.”
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Public Thinker: Chawne Kimber on Constructing Quilts and Speaking History
“You cannot talk about race without talking about cotton. The materials that I use are desperately important as a layer of meaning in the work that I make.”
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Necessary Housework: Dismantling the Master’s House
White supremacy tells us we do not belong, but we do have a place in history.
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Freedom for Whom?
What right does a society have to extoll freedom as its highest virtue if that same society is dependent on the unfreedom of others?
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What Folklore Erases: Under Columbus, Georgia
The current owner of the Lion House is happy to let rumors about his property’s basement passageway simmer.
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Hilton Head Island—Haunted by Its Own History
Historical traces of racism and exclusion remain on the island. It’s just that new residents can’t—or won’t—read them.[none-for-homepage]
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Imperialism: A Syllabus
Opposition to imperialism unites the struggles of our times. To recognize empire is to take a necessary step towards a more just world.
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Remembering Is Resistance
Confronting painful pasts gives society an opportunity to change. This is why those invested in the amnesiac status quo fight against memory.
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The Poetics of Abolition
For poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, as for the Black Romantics, history is the repetition of anti-Black violence that has yet to be abolished.
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As American as Child Separation
The United States tears families apart—during slavery, in the wars against indigenous people and the war on drugs, and, today, at the border.
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The Arch of Injustice
St. Louis seems to define America’s past—but does it offer insight for the future?
