Category: Slavery
Jamelle Bouie on How the Domestic Slave Trade Worked
Jamelle Bouie has a big article in the New York Times Sunday Review on the Atlantic Slave Trade today, bit he also wrote a short…
Animated Map of the Slave Trade Shows All Recorded Voyages
This animated map depicting the “slave trade” has been around for a number of years. About 4% of those Atlantic slave trade ships landed in…
Studying the Origins of the Civil War With South Carolina’s School Kids Circa 1918
I want to look at what South Carolina school children learned about the lead-up to the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era by reading the…
Washington Post Database Identifies 1,700 Slaveowners In Senate and Congress
The Washington Post has put together a remarkable database of Members of Congress and Senators who owned slaves. You can find the article explaining the…
Jefferson Davis and the Constitutional Right to Own Slaves
Many of us learned in school to revere the Constitution as a “Charter of Freedom,” a Magna Carta of rights for the ordinary citizen. More…
1619 Project Book’s History Defended
I saw Nikole Hannah-Jones speak at Hofstra University where I teach back in the days before the Pandemic. She spoke in the largest theater on…
The Feldman Thesis “Lincoln Broke the Constitution” and Its Critics
Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman has a new book out The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America that is attracting attention…
South Carolina “A White Man Named Taylor, Who Had Made Negroes His Only Companions…”
In spite of all the nonsense Lost Cause writers once spun about whites and slaves being friends in the Old South, those whites who formed…
When Free Blacks Had to Wear Badges to Show Their Racial Status in South Carolina August 1860
While there were “free Blacks” living in South Carolina before the Civil War, their position was precarious and their freedoms were circumscribed. This article in…
How the Descendants of Slaves Are Impacting Plantation Museums
The Washington Post has an article on how the descendants of slaves are impacting how plantation museums tell their stories. From the article: Robert Bellinger…