northern slavery

While documented revolts of enslaved persons in New Jersey aren’t abundant, some examples speak to the spirit of resistance among African people held captive.

A group of activists is calling attention to the legacy of slavery encoded in the names of New York City’s streets and neighborhoods.

Some of the same Lexington townspeople who took up arms to fight for freedom on April 19, 1775, were slave owners. And one of them was enslaved.

New Jersey was known as the slave state of the North, and our early economy was built on unpaid labor.

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

Rumors that enslaved Black New Yorkers were planning a revolt spread across Manhattan even more quickly than the fires for which they were being blamed.

A new biography of Phillis Wheatley places her in her era and shows the ways she used poetry to criticize the existence of slavery.

Was abolition intended as a perpetuation of slavery by other means?

Many don’t realize Newport, Rhode Island launched more slave trading voyages than anywhere else in North America.

Harvard made headlines by announcing that it would devote $100 million to remedying “the harms of the university’s ties to slavery.”

The school said it had benefited from slave-generated wealth and practiced racial discrimination.

A new book examines the ways white slaveholders were compensated, while formerly enslaved people were not.

A document thought lost to history shows how Sojourner Truth became the first Black woman to successfully sue white men to get her son released from slavery.

Jennifer L. Morgan on the intersectionality of enslaved women and common misunderstandings about slavery.

A new history charts the radical agitation around Black rights and freedom back to the early nineteenth century. 

The pre-Civil War North was a landscape not of unremitting white supremacy but of persistent struggles over racial justice by both Blacks and whites.

Entangled with, yet critical of, colonial oppression and the evils of slavery, the true history of Boston can now be told.

No, the Civil War didn’t end slavery, and the first Africans didn’t arrive in America in 1619.

What 1619 has become to the history of American slavery, 1688 is to the history of American antislavery.

Racial injustice is not a regional sickness. It's a national cancer.