oratory

Frederick Douglass’ 1852 speech is widely known as one of the greatest abolitionist speeches ever.

The complex history, career, and legacy of one of America's most popular speakers and reformers.

On the long tradition of Black third-party activism.

A journalistic view of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, work, and representation in American society.

King offered Americans the choice between acting in accordance with the Constitution and resistance to change.  In many ways, we face the same choice today.

We revere the man and revile the strategy, but King knew what he was doing.

A short history of a misunderstood literary genre and the world it created.

A new book offers the first full-length biography of newspaper editor, labor leader and minister Samuel Ringgold Ward.

We can’t blame Joe McCarthy for this one. (Though he was a fan.)

Meet the duo who helped achieve the most important labor and civil rights victories of their age.

A Black Power radical, a Navy veteran, and the story behind the most boring channel on television.

At a time of upheaval, we want to believe that better leaders have the power to change the course of history. But counterfactuals are never simple.

Richard Cándida Smith on Ian Tyrrell’s "American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea."

Digitization allows researchers to trace editorial and authorial changes in archival content. Both are central to the study of this famous abolitionist pamphlet.

In 1850s Vermont, Achsa Sprague swore that the spirits who helped her walk again also possessed her with a crucial mission: freeing every soul in America.

A behind-the-scenes look at Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

It would be hard to blame him if he had lost faith in the republic.

Georgia Sen.-elect Raphael Warnock is pastor of the church where Martin Luther King Jr. preached.

Eugene Debs’s unswerving commitment to democracy and internationalism was born out of his revulsion at the tyranny of industrial capitalism.

How today's protests are struggling to reclaim the vision of the great abolitionist leader.