Posts Tagged ‘Slavery’
Secrets of Harriet Tubman’s life are being revealed 100 years later
More than a century after her death, historians are still unraveling the secrets of her life. This month the nation celebrates Harriet Tubman’s bicentennial and the fifth anniversary of the two national parks named after her. From film screenings and historical lectures to art exhibits and monument installations, here’s how you can uncover the mystery that shrouds Tubman’s life and honor the legacy of a woman who inspired generations.
Read MoreProvidence mayor forms city reparations commission
Following a precedent set by cities such as Chicago, Providence, Rhode Island works toward a practical reparations plan in recognition of the past abuses Black and Indigenous people faced.
Read MoreMany African American last names hold weight of Black history
Black Americans know names hold power, which is why many took care choosing new names after they were free from enslavement. Many of their descendants still bear those names.
Read MoreAmerica’s First Abolitionist Newspaper Is Being Revived
America’s first newspaper dedicated to advocating for the end of slavery is being resurrected and reimagined more than two centuries later as the nation continues to grapple with its legacy of racism.
Read MoreFamily trees fill in the gaps for Black people seeking their ancestral roots
By Curtis Bunn, NBC News Black people have been able to connect with the past and give new agency to their identities through building family trees and researching their family histories. Growing up in Philadelphia, Amber Jackson said she knew so little of her history that she felt disconnected from who she was. “They didn’t…
Read MoreWe Still Can’t See American Slavery for What It Was
What is known about the Trans-Atlantic slave trade? We know a great deal about the scale of human trafficking across the Atlantic Ocean and about the people aboard each ship. Much of that research is available to the public in the form of the SlaveVoyages database. A detailed repository of information on individual ships, individual voyages and even individual people, it is a groundbreaking tool for scholars of slavery, the slave trade and the Atlantic world. And it continues to grow. Last year, the team behind SlaveVoyages introduced a new data set with information.
Read MoreIda B. Wells, Black journalist and suffragist, honored with new Barbie doll
By Adela Suliman, Washington Post Black American journalist, suffragist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells will have her likeness transformed into a Barbie doll to honor her historic achievements. Wells, who was born into slavery in Mississippi in 1862 during the Civil War, went on to break boundaries as a prominent suffragist fighting to expand…
Read MoreThe Last Slave Ship review: the Clotilda, Africatown and a lasting American injustice
Ben Raines’s perceptive new book, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning, is a welcome and affecting history lesson.
This story from long ago puts into context what the new spate of lawlessness in the US is all about. Raines tells a tale of racism and greed. Anyone who imagines that attempting to circumvent democracy is a new thing has forgotten the civil war.
Read MoreEighty years late: groundbreaking work on slave economy is finally published in UK?
In 1938, a brilliant young Black scholar at Oxford University wrote a thesis on the economic history of British empire and challenged a claim about slavery that had been defining Britain’s role in the world for more than a century.Slavery, Williams argues, was abolished in much of the British empire in 1833 because doing so at that time was in Britain’s economic self-interest – not because the British suddenly discovered a conscience.“ The capitalists had first encouraged West Indian slavery and then helped to destroy it,” he writes.
Read MoreAmerica’s 50,000 monuments: More mermaids than congresswomen, more Confederates than abolitionists
By Gillian Brockell, The Washington Post Hundreds of public monuments have come down amid the racial reckoning sparked by the murder of George Floyd last year. Some were toppled by protesters armed with rope; others have been disassembled and carted away by professionals hired by local governments. These removals may seem, well, monumental. But according to a study of U.S.…
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