emancipation

Why abolitionist Lydia Maria Child raged at President Lincoln’s political calculations.

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

The letters show a desire for freedom and a desperate longing to be reunited with their families.

West Ford’s descendants want to prove his parentage—and save the freedmen’s village he founded.

The topic is emotional. That’s not a bad thing.

In Maryland, a memorial for two lynching victims reveals how America is grappling with its history of racial terror.

The Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project explores the meaning of freedom through the example of one extraordinary life.

Abraham Lincoln proclaimed freedom for enslaved people in America on January 1, 1863. Today, we've annotated the Emancipation Proclamation for readers.

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.

It erases the fact that, for the first 70 years of its existence, the US was roiled by intense, escalating conflict over slavery – a conflict only resolved by civil war.

Decades before Thoreau's famous experiment, a community of formerly enslaved men and women had a much different experience of life in the woods.

Why has a relatively conventional history of the War of Independence drawn such an outraged response?

W.E.B. Du Bois defined the shift from slavery to freedom as a “general strike” — and there are parallels to today.

Cailloux’s valor, and the Black troops he led in battle, electrified northern opinion and gave federal race policy a strong jolt.

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

The little-known story of Robert Carter III.

Tyler Stovall demonstrates ways that people have conflated freedom with whiteness but pays too little attention to the force of freedom as a concept.

Frederick Douglass and Republican legislators had high hopes for Andrew Johnson—but ended up impeaching him.

What the Dred Scott v. Sandford case meant for black citizenship.

When African Americans allied themselves with the British, the Patriots were enraged, and they acted.