African culture

How preparation for a big purchase turned into an adventure through history.

In 1990, scholars found a Sierra Leonean woman who remembered a nearly identical version of a tune passed down by a Georgia woman’s enslaved ancestors

Throughout its botanical, cultural, and social history, the watermelon has been a vehicle for our ideas about community, survival, and what we owe the future.

When I looked at the archives, I found a history hidden in plain sight.

In "American Slavers," Sean M. Kelley surveys the relatively unknown history of Americans who traded in slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Should museums only exhibit work of their own culture, or should they bring the world to visitors?

The banjo did not exist before it was created by the hands of enslaved people in the New World.

Swampland communities established by self-liberated slaves in Louisiana offer a model to cope with climate disruption.

Cheap palm oil is part of an interlocking late capitalist system.

Human relationships to this global crop have been shaped by both violence and resilience.

The musical traditions found in contemporary Black U.S. and Caribbean Christian worship originated hundreds of years ago, continents away.

A new creative history comes closer than ever to giving us access to Turner’s visionary life.

Emma Dabiri deconstructs colonial ideas of Blackness.

On the stories and landscapes the Federal Writers’ Project left unexplored.

Restoring agency to enslaved people means acknowledging not only that they created marriages, but that they ended them, too.

Laurent Dubois discusses the banjo's history and its symbolism of community, slavery, resistance, and ultimately America itself.

The roots of rice in South Carolina's Lowcountry are troubling and complicated. Today, we stir the pot.

Kente serves as more than a pop of color at college graduations.

How an African instrument got a racist reinvention.

The Great Dismal Swamp was once a thriving refuge for runaways