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Frederick Douglass’s Vision for a Reborn America

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, he dreamed of a pluralist utopia.

The Achievements, and Compromises, of Two Reconstruction-era Amendments

While they advanced African American rights, they had serious flaws, Eric Foner writes.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Narratives of Freedom

In Coates's debut novel, he sets out to recover the struggles for emancipation that have been lost to the past.
Title page of "The History of the New York African Free-Schools."

The New York Manumission Society

Inspired by America’s exceptional idea, it took a vital step toward securing liberty for slaves.
Emancipation Day in South Carolina
Exhibit

Emancipation

The long history of emancipation in the United States, from individual escapes and manumissions, through Civil War fighting and Reconstruction legislation, to Juneteenth commemorations.

Slavery in the President's Neighborhood

Many people think of the White House as a symbol of democracy, but it also embodies America’s complicated past.

Muskets! Axes! Revolt! Here Are the Plans for a Reenactment of an Actual 1811 Rebellion

This fall 500 Louisianans, in 19th-century attire, will re-create America’s largest plantation uprising.

In 1870, Henrietta Wood Sued for Reparations—and Won

The $2,500 verdict, the largest ever of its kind, offers evidence of the generational impact such awards can have.
partner

The Civil War and the Black West

On the integrated Union regiments composed of white, black, and native men who fought in the Civil War's western theatre.
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Freedom's Fortress

Exploring Virginia’s Fort Monroe – the place where slavery began in British North America, and where, during the Civil War, it began to unravel.

The Class Politics of the Civil War

By naming a common enemy the Union Army was able to build and then steer a coalition of Americans toward the systematic destruction of slavery.

In Defense of the American Revolution

1776 began as a petty squabble among odious and powerful elites. It soon became the lodestar of emancipatory movements everywhere.
Signing of the Declaration of Independence

The Universalist Principles of the Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence advocates for liberty and equality. We would do well to remember those principles today.

Why This Mexican Village Celebrates Juneteenth

Descendants of slaves who escaped across the southern border observe Texas’s emancipation holiday with their own unique traditions.
Josiah Henson

Before ‘Uncle Tom’ Was a Bestseller, He Was Josiah Henson

Born into slavery, this preacher and Underground Railroad conductor served as the inspiration for a history-making book.

The Birthplace of American Slavery Debated Abolishing it After Nat Turner’s Bloody Revolt

Virginia engaged in “the most public, focused, and sustained discussion of slavery and emancipation that ever occurred."

The Statue of Liberty Was Created to Celebrate Freed Slaves, Not Immigrants

Lady Liberty was inspired by the end of the Civil War and emancipation. The connection to immigration came later.
Portrait photograph of Harriet Jacobs as an older woman

Incidents in the Life of Harriet Jacobs

A virtual tour of "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl."

The Prophet Is Human

A towering new biography of the great American orator and public intellectual Frederick Douglass.

The Internationalist History of the US Suffrage Movement

What we miss when we tell the story of women's rights activism as a strictly national tale.

Making Good on the Broken Promise of Reparations

Ignoring the moral imperative of repairing slavery's wounds because it might be “divisive” reinforces a myth of white innocence.
Fugitive slave ad taken out by Thomas Jefferson.

Freedom on the Move

A database of fugitives from American Slavery.

Martin Luther King Jr. and the Meaning of Emancipation

He was a revolutionary, if one committed to nonviolence. But nonviolence does not exhaust his philosophy.

Harriet Tubman’s Daring Civil War Raid

Abolishing slavery wasn’t enough. Someone had to actually free the enslaved people of the American south.
Lithograph of Thomas Jefferson

Hero or Villain, Both and Neither: Appraising Thomas Jefferson, 200 Years Later

A Pulitzer historian assesses what we are to make of UVA’s founder, 200 years hence.

The Double Battle

A review of David Blight's new biography of Frederick Douglass.
Robert E. Lee surrendering to Ulysses Grant.
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Why Some White Americans see Racial Equality as Oppression

White victimhood's roots in the Civil War.

Citizens: 150 Years of the 14th Amendment

In 1868, black activists had already been promoting birthright as the basis of their national belonging for nearly half a century.

When the Fourth of July Was a Black Holiday

After the Civil War, African Americans in the South transformed Independence Day into a celebration of their newly won freedom.
Abolitionist political cartoon depicting the devil telling a slaveholder he is sinning.
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How Antebellum Christians Justified Slavery

In the minds of some Southern Protestants, slavery had been divinely sanctioned.

Lonesome for Our Home

Zora Neale Hurston’s long-lost oral history with one of the last survivors of the Atlantic slave trade.

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