Juneteenth

How the fight of one Black Texas family to make freedom real offers lessons for Texas lawmakers trying to erase history from the classroom.

The real history of Juneteenth is much messier—and more inspiring.

Before Juneteenth became an official federal holiday, 94-year-old Opal Lee was on a mission.

On Juneteenth, we should remember both the struggle against chattel slavery and the struggle for radical freedom during Reconstruction.

I had sung the Black National Anthem countless times, but hearing those words reverberate around me in this place, on this day, moved me in a new way.

This year’s Juneteenth commemorations must take a deeper look at the history of Black self-liberation to understand what emancipation really means.

How a Texan holiday became a national tradition.

A celebration of emancipation in Texas is taking hold in the minds of Americans everywhere.

The holiday is a reminder of the Civil War's larger meaning, the unfulfilled promise of Reconstruction, and the reinforcement of democratic values.

Historical photographs of early Juneteenth celebrations throughout its home state of Texas and across the country.

The most famous Emancipation holiday is more necessary now than it has ever been.

The internecine conflict and the institution of slavery could not and did not end neatly at Appomattox or on Galveston Island.

The menu of Emancipation Day

The legacies of our racial past, and the prospects ahead for an embattled republic.

Emancipation Days symbolized America’s attempt to free the enslaved across the nation. But those days were unable to prevent new forms of economic slavery.

Pulitzer-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed reflects on the battle for the past and the fragile state of American democracy.

Why are politics so consumed with the past?

Millions of Americans gained freedom from slavery in a slow-moving wave of emancipation during the Civil War and in the months afterward.

To what extent did the Union general's famous orders actually liberate the enslaved in Texas?

What would it mean to define the Civil War as a necessary and crucial final step in the long, even more tragic history of slavery in America?