expansion of slavery

Antebellum slaveholders weren't content with an economic and social system based on trafficking in human flesh in the South alone.

How the U.S. Army's antebellum camel experimentation paved the way for the illicit trafficking of enslaved Africans.

The South's insistence upon protecting and spreading slavery caused the Civil War.

The international ambitions of the US slaveholding class and the abolitionist movement that brought them down.

Before the Civil War, many Southern leaders hoped to expand slavery even beyond the nation's borders.

As the hunger for more farmland stretched west, so too did the demand for enslaved labor.

How can one place represent the complexity of the Civil War’s beginnings?

To understand the proslavery defense of the 1850s, one must reckon with the proslavery Malthusianism articulated by Cooper in the 1820s.

A new book seeks to explain why many Americans, especially but not exclusively in the South, have understood freedom as an entitlement for white people.

Kevin McCarthy's struggling bid to win the speakership has nothing on the epic 1856 contest that pitted abolitionists against proslavery members of Congress.

Historian Gerald Horne has developed a grand theory of U.S. history as a series of devastating backlashes to progress—right down to the present day.

San Bernardino County may explore seceding from California. Many of the earliest separatists wanted to transform Southern California into a slave state.

How shall a generation know its story, if it will know no other?

McCarthy imagined a vast border region where colonial empires clashed, tribes went to war, and bounty hunters roamed.

The Washington Post has compiled the first database of slaveholding members of Congress by examining thousands of census records and historical documents.

The proliferation of antebellum print is analogous to our own tectonic shifts in how people communicate and what they communicate about.

Recent books by Woody Holton and Alan Taylor offer fresh perspectives on early US history but overstate the importance of white supremacy as its driving force.

Tens of thousands of Indigenous people labored in bondage across the western United States in the 1800s.

In his new book, The Crooked Path to Abolition, James Oakes argues that the Constitution was an antislavery document.

John C. Calhoun knew what a strong federal government might do.