abolition 
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SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
4/20/2022
The Unbearable Whiteness of Ken Burns
by Timothy Messer-Kruse
In the context of today's battles over teaching the history of racism in America, the new Franklin documentary unfortunately uses its subject to spin a narrative of national self-correction that ignores historians' attention to conflict and struggle.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
4/19/2022
T. Thomas Fortune: The Forgotten Founder of Abolition Democracy
by Robin D.G. Kelley
T. Thomas Fortune's critique of Reconstruction is a radical intellectual document that has valuable lessons for the activists and scholars associated with the prison abolition movement.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
3/25/2022
Linda Hirshman Offers a Lively Dissection of the Competing Strains of American Abolitionism
by Drew Gilpin Faust
Hirshman focuses on the complex character of abolitionist editor Maria Weston Chapman, whose combination of moral fervor and racial prejudice pushed Frederick Douglass from the moralistic Garrisonian camp to a pragmatic and more effective strategy of political activism.
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3/6/2022
How Lincoln and Douglass Joined Forces for Freedom
by Jonathan W. White
Lincoln's discussions with Frederick Douglass should make clear the difference between the president's public statements and his inner convictions on emancipation.
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SOURCE: New York Times
11/2/2021
Wilentz: New Book Says Jefferson Davis was Right About the Constitution. What About Lincoln?
by Sean Wilentz
Noah Feldman's new books says that, in 1861, Jefferson Davis was right about the Constitution's sanction of slavery, and only the rupture of the Civil War could amend and reset the document. Sean Wilentz disagrees.
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SOURCE: Dissent
8/30/2021
An American Conception of Justice
by Michael Kazin
While historians have demonstrated the racist operation of American institutions, it's important to recognize that those institutions have also been instruments for justice.
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SOURCE: Mother Jones
7/22/2021
Today It’s Critical Race Theory. 200 Years Ago It Was Abolitionist Literature
In 1829, South Carolina and Georgia responded to a series of fires they assumed were set by enslaved people by banning both the abolitionist literature they blamed for inciting rebellion and the teaching of literacy to slaves. Today's battles over curriculum are likewise about ideas deemed threatening to social hierarchies.
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5/2/2021
Elijah Lovejoy Faced Down Violent Mobs to Champion Abolition and the Free Press
by Ken Ellingwood
In 1837, Elijah Lovejoy was killed by a pro-slavery mob in Illinois, and the press he used to publish his abolitionist newsletter was thrown into the Mississippi River. Lovejoy's championing of both abolition and the free press should inspire us today.
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SOURCE: Civil War Memory
2/2/2021
Manipulating Frederick Douglass and His Historical Record
by Kevin M. Levin
Frederick Douglass intended his portraits as visual representations of freedom, autonomy and dignity. The author wonders if it's appropriate to take the liberty of indulging in the trendy photo animation technology with the portraits of historical figures.
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SOURCE: CNN
2/16/2021
It's Time to Stop Calling Slavery America's 'Original Sin'
by James Goodman
The theological origins of "original sin" mean that the metaphor portrays slavery, racism, and the dispossession of Native American lands as evils foisted upon Americans, rather than as social and political products of choices made by them.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
2/10/2021
A Forgotten Black Founding Father
by Danielle Allen
The figure of Black abolitionist Prince Hall has been discussed for his advocacy for abolition in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but there remains a deeper work of historical reconstruction to understand his connections to family, community and civil society in the founding era.
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SOURCE: Tropics of Meta
1/13/2021
Josh Hawley Is Not the First Missouri Senator with Blood on His Hands
by Steven Lubet
Senator Josh Hawley arguably helped incite a mob to invade the Capitol to thwart the certification of Biden's victory. Missouri's antebellum senator David Rice Atchison helped incite a civil war in Kansas in 1854.
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SOURCE: The Hill
12/2/2020
Democrats Introduce Legislation to Strike Slavery Exception in 13th Amendment
The proposal would eliminate a loophole written into the 13th Amendment that allows involuntary servitude to be imposed on persons convicted of a crime. Some recent scholars have argued that this exemption is a foundation of the current system of mass incarceration.
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SOURCE: Labor and Working Class History Association
11/27/2020
Wishbone of The Good Lord Bird
by Mark Lause
"In the end, The Good Lord Bird spins a worthwhile and entertaining yarn, but each episode starts with the unfortunate and misleading words: 'All of this is true. Most of it happened'."
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SOURCE: CBS News
11/29/2020
Finding the Last Ship Known to have Brought Enslaved Africans to America and the Descendants of its Survivors
"The Clotilda was burned and sunk in an Alabama River after bringing 110 imprisoned people across the Atlantic in 1860. Two years ago, its remains were found."
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
10/26/2020
The Mischievous Irreverence of “The Good Lord Bird”
“The Good Lord Bird” roots for Brown, but it has no patience for hagiography.
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SOURCE: NPR
10/19/2020
John Brown And Abraham Lincoln: Divergent Paths In The Fight To End Slavery (audio)
H.W. Brands discusses his new book "The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom" with NPR's Fresh Air.
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SOURCE: Confederates in My Closet
10/6/2020
Why the White Abolitionist Should Have Listened to the Black Abolitionist
by Ann Banks
In a rave review of the video series The Good Lord Bird, the New York Times proclaimed in its headline “the necessity of John Brown.” As a muse, John Brown is having a moment.
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SOURCE: Fox News
9/6/2020
University Of Maryland Renames Women's Studies Department After Harriet Tubman
The University of Maryland made the change to honr the hero of emancipation and reflect its commitment to teaching and scholarship about Black women's history.
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SOURCE: Harvard Gazette
8/28/2020
Crowd-Sourcing the Story of a People
Tiya Miles is professor of history and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the new director of the Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard. She discusses the practice, teaching, and value of public history as "a boisterous, crowd-sourced endeavor."
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