slavery

• 
• SOURCE: The Guardian
  3/30/2023
  

  Gullah Geechee of Sea Islands Fight for their Post-Slavery Legacy

  by DeNeen L Brown

  The Gullah Geechee people were chosen for enslavement in the Sea Islands because of their experience cultivating rice in Africa, and maintained a distinctive culture with strong African elements through slavery and emancipation. Development and gentrification threaten that legacy today. 

• 
• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  

  Why Everyone Born in the US is a Citizen, and Why it Matters

  by Amanda Frost

  In upholding birthright citizenship in the case of US v. Wong Kim Ark, the court invoked English common law, rather than claims to citizenship rights and freedom by escaped slaves, as the foundation of the 14th Amendment's definition of citizenship. This makes the principle vulnerable when it should be unassailable. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  3/16/2023
  

  Citing Slavery-Era Property Law, VA Judge Rules Embryos are Property

  A bioethicist argued that the judge could have resolved a property dispute without reference to chattel slavery, and that invoking the statue was offensive. 

• 
• SOURCE: Atlas Obscura
  3/9/2023
  

  Portraying the Women Leaders of Slave Rebellions

  Rebecca Hall, author of a new graphic history, says women warriors and rebels have been portrayed as exceptions proving the rule instead of as freedom fighters. 

• 
• SOURCE: WHYY
  3/3/2023
  

  Historian and Social Psychologist Discuss How to Confront Difficult Aspects of History

  Hasan Kwame Jeffries and Dolly Chugh have an interdisciplinary discussion of why difficult and conflictual elements of history must be taught, and how to enable students and teachers to do it productively. 

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  3/6/2023
  

  "Slavery Was Wrong" and Some Other Things Teachers are Afraid to Teach

  The Rand Corporation found that a quarter of teachers of math, science and English were revising their lesson plans to remove topics on race and gender, with fear of parents being the biggest reason. 

• 
• SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
  3/1/2023
  

  Descendants of Slaveholder Donor Denounce Law School Name Change

  T.C. Williams donated a considerable sum to the University of Richmond's law school. He also relied on slave labor in his tobacco and manufacturing businesses. The university's new policy requires them to remove his name from a building. Descendants call this hypocritical and ungrateful and demanded an inflation-adjusted refund with interest of $3.4 billion.

• 
• SOURCE: The New Republic
  2/8/2023
  

  It's Up to McCarthy to Remove Statues of Slavers from the Capitol

  A third of the artworks in the Capitol depict slaveholders. Whether they're replaced with other works, possibly those celebrating liberators, is largely up to the new House Speaker. 

• 
• SOURCE: WTVR
  2/4/2023
  

  New Resources Help Virginians Fill in Hidden Family Histories Including Enslaved Ancestors

  “Researchers and librarians would say things like, 'That history just doesn’t exist.' Or, 'We just don’t have those records,'" Lydia Neuroth with the Library of Virginia explained. "But we are realizing we do. We just haven’t done a good job sharing it.”

• 
• SOURCE: Age of Revolutions
  1/30/2023
  

  George Washington in Barbados?

  by Erica Johnson Edwards

  The local monuments to George Washington's 1751 visit to Barbados demonstrate the interconnectedness of American and Caribbean histories as well as the influence of Caribbean practices of enslavement on the institution in the United States. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Guardian
  1/31/2023
  

  Exhibition: Church of England's Links to Slavery

  The exhibition is an acknowledgment of the church's investments in the transatlantic slave trade, but critics argue that the church remains obligated to pay reparations. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Conversation
  1/24/2023
  

  Some Escaped Slavery Without Escaping the South

  by Viola Franziska Müller

  The majority of people escaping slavery before Emancipation never crossed the Mason-Dixon line, finding a measure of freedom in southern cities. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  1/17/2023
  

  Edward Larson Speaks to the New History Wars

  by Jon Meacham

  "To me, Larson’s unemotional account of the Republic’s beginnings confirms a tragic truth: that influential white Americans knew — and understood — that slavery was wrong and liberty was precious, but chose not to act according to that knowledge and that understanding."

• 
• 1/15/2023
  

  Teach the History Behind "Emancipation" with the Primary Sources

  by Alan J. Singer

  Antoine Fuqua and Will Smith's "Emancipation" has rediscovered the life of an enslaved man variously called Peter or Gordon, who had been made famous through an 1863 photograph. Here's how history teachers can use the primary records of his life to accompany the film. 

• 
• SOURCE: NPR
  1/7/2023
  

  How Barbados's Reparations Movement Found the International Spotlight

  The availability of clear records tying British families – like that of actor Benedict Cumberbatch – to Caribbean slavery has made the movement for reparations in Barbados and other island nations very visible, if not yet successful. 

• 
• SOURCE: Smithsonian
  1/10/2023
  

  Was Present-Day Panama the Site of the First Slave Revolt in the Americas?

  Papers in the General Archive of the Indies in Sevilla, Spain, helped Robert Schwaller to challenge the established timeline and expand the geography of slave rebellion in the Americas.

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  12/21/2022
  

  Was the Civil War Inevitable?

  by David W. Blight

  As a growing number of Americans entertain the idea that dissolving the nation might be better than holding its incompatible parts together, it's worth revisiting the series of decisions that led to the Civil War, and to ask whether the nation has, or will, experience the equivalent of the Dred Scott decision. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Review of Books
  12/16/2022
  

  Was Emancipation Intended to Perpetuate Slavery by Other Means?

  by Sean Wilentz

  Protests movements have latched on to a misguided interpretation of the Thirteenth Amendment that argues it allowed and even encouraged the system of mass incarceration as an extension of slavery. A new global history extends that critique to the age of emancipation in general.

• 
• SOURCE: TIME
  11/9/2022
  

  Will Smith's Scars in "Emancipation" Connect an Antislavery Photo and Racial Inequality Today

  The violations of the bodies of the enslaved were part of the process of racist oppression; contemporary institutions exhibit practices that are not too much different. 

• 
• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  12/5/2022
  

  William Still Preserved the Black History of Abolition at a Time of Danger

  by Julia W. Bernier

  After emancipation, the meticulous records William Still kept about the fellow Black people he helped to reach freedom became a tool in a different struggle: to fight against the erasure of Black humanity and power by proponents of Jim Crow and the Lost Cause.