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Aerial photo of housing projects in the Bronx.

Suffering, Grace and Redemption: How The Bronx Came to Be

On the early history of New York City's northernmost borough.
by Ian Frazier via Literary Hub on September 6, 2024
Enslaved men gathered in the woods to plot a revolt.

Slavery and Rebellion in Eighteenth-Century New Jersey

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.
by Rann Miller via Black Perspectives on March 27, 2023
A Slavers of New York sticker pasted over a Bergen Street subway sign.

Mapping the History of Slavery in New York

A group of activists is calling attention to the legacy of slavery encoded in the names of New York City’s streets and neighborhoods.
by Ada Reso, Maria Robles, Elsa Eli Waithe, Francesca Johanson via Guernica on April 21, 2021
Historian and scholar Robert Bellinger outside the Buckman Tavern in Lexington. The town’s Historical Society has launched a study of the presence of enslaved people during the Revolutionary War in Lexington. JONATHAN WIGGS/GLOBE STAFF

Lexington Confronts History of Slavery in Liberty’s Birthplace

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.
by Nancy Shohet West via Boston Globe on April 16, 2021
A home in Paramus, New Jersey.

Slavery's Legacy Is Written All Over North Jersey, If You Know Where to Look

New Jersey was known as the slave state of the North, and our early economy was built on unpaid labor.
by Julia Martin via North Jersey on February 28, 2021

‘This Land Is Yours’

The missing Black history of upstate New York challenges the delusion of New York as a land of freedom far removed from the American original sin of slavery.
by Nell Irvin Painter via New York Review of Books on March 9, 2025
Faneuil Hall in Boston at night.

Why Faneuil Hall Is a Metaphor for the American Revolution’s Complicated Definition of Liberty

How a lively market on Boston Harbor became part of many defining moments of the Colonial and Revolutionary eras.
by Michael Snyder via Smithsonian on January 8, 2025
A group of three abolitonists standing in front of a man holding a bag of money and brandishing a chair as a weapon, with the caption "The Disappointed Abolitionists."

The Tedious Heroism of David Ruggles

History also changes because of strange, flawed, deeply human people doing unremarkable, tedious, and often boring work.
by Isaac Kolding via Commonplace on December 24, 2024
Sea Captains drinking alcohol

Ships Going Out

In "American Slavers," Sean M. Kelley surveys the relatively unknown history of Americans who traded in slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
by James Oakes via New York Review of Books on August 31, 2023
Drawing of a Black man in court pleading with a judge in 1741.

Was the Conspiracy That Gripped New York in 1741 Real?

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.
by Ashawnta Jackson, Andy Doolen, Richard E. Bond, Thomas J. Davis via JSTOR Daily on April 30, 2023
Drawing of Phillis Wheatley writing at a desk.

The Great American Poet Who Was Named After a Slave Ship

A new biography of Phillis Wheatley places her in her era and shows the ways she used poetry to criticize the existence of slavery.
by Tiya Miles via The Atlantic on April 22, 2023
Engraving of freed slaves arriving at Union lines, New Bern, North Carolina, 1863.

The Emancipators’ Vision

Was abolition intended as a perpetuation of slavery by other means?
by Sean Wilentz via New York Review of Books on December 1, 2022
2 African American women in front of a mural of trade ships and a Black pianist on ocean waves.

Slave Money Paved the Streets. Now This Posh RI City Strives to Teach Its Past.

Many don’t realize Newport, Rhode Island launched more slave trading voyages than anywhere else in North America.
by Asher Lehrer-Small via The 74 on July 20, 2022
Chains with ivy on it

Endowed by Slavery

Harvard made headlines by announcing that it would devote $100 million to remedying “the harms of the university’s ties to slavery.”
by Andrew Delbanco via New York Review of Books on June 2, 2022
A gate opening to the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Mass.

Harvard Leaders and Staff Enslaved 79 People, University Finds

The school said it had benefited from slave-generated wealth and practiced racial discrimination.
by Nick Anderson, Susan Svrluga via Washington Post on April 26, 2022
INTERIM ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES A map of slavery laws in the United States, from 1775 to 1865.

A Reckoning With How Slavery Ended

A new book examines the ways white slaveholders were compensated, while formerly enslaved people were not.
by Eric Herschthal via The New Republic on April 15, 2022
Finger pointing to a writ of habeas corpus filed on behalf of Sojourner Truth

State Archives Find Sojourner Truth’s Historic Court Case

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.
by Kenneth C. Crowe II via Times Union on February 1, 2022
Jennifer L. Morgan portrayed beside her book

Black Feminist in Public: Jennifer L. Morgan Reckons with Slavery

On the intersectionality of enslaved women and common misunderstandings about slavery.
by Janell Hobson, Jennifer L. Morgan via Ms. Magazine on June 17, 2021
Black men and women in Hilton Head, South Carolina, after the Civil War.

The United States' First Civil Rights Movement

A new history charts the radical agitation around Black rights and freedom back to the early nineteenth century. 
by Kellie Carter Jackson via The Nation on June 16, 2021
Engraving of freedmen voting in New Orleans, 1867

Forging an Early Black Politics

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.
by Sean Wilentz via New York Review of Books on June 11, 2021
Detail of Anti-Slavery Picnic at Weymouth Landing, Massachusetts (c1845) by Susan Torrey Merritt. Courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago

New England Kept Slavery, But Not Its Profits, At a Distance

Entangled with, yet critical of, colonial oppression and the evils of slavery, the true history of Boston can now be told.
by Mark A. Peterson via Aeon on May 3, 2021

Five Myths About Slavery

No, the Civil War didn’t end slavery, and the first Africans didn’t arrive in America in 1619.
by Daina Ramey Berry, Talitha L. LeFlouria via Washington Post on February 7, 2020

American Slavery and ‘the Relentless Unforeseen’

What 1619 has become to the history of American slavery, 1688 is to the history of American antislavery.
by Sean Wilentz via New York Review of Books on November 19, 2019
partner

How New York Became the Capital of the Jim Crow North

Racial injustice is not a regional sickness. It's a national cancer.
by Jeanne Theoharis, Brian Purnell via Made By History on August 23, 2017
Elizabeth Freeman.
partner

How Two Massachusetts Slaves Won Their Freedom — And Then Abolished Slavery

What today's activists can learn from their victories.
by Ben Railton via Made By History on July 3, 2017
Illustration of grave robbing

Body Snatchers of Old New York

In the 1780s, medical schools used cadavers stolen from the cemeteries of slaves.
by Bess Lovejoy via Lapham’s Quarterly on October 13, 2013
Cutouts of Ulysses S. Grant and Julia Dent Grant in front of slave quarters.

Unraveling Ulysses S. Grant's Complex Relationship With Slavery

The Union general directly benefited from the brutal institution before and during the Civil War.
by John Reeves via Smithsonian on December 5, 2023
USCT flag depicting a Black soldier next to a white woman symbolizing the United States.

USCT Kin’s Generational Battle for Equality

Paid less than their white counterparts, Black men in the United States Colored Troops fought for the Union and the future of their families.
by Holly A. Pinheiro Jr. via Muster on September 19, 2023
Painting of a pond surrounded by lush vegetation.

A Paradise for All

The relentless radicalism of Benjamin Lay.
by Astra Taylor via Lapham’s Quarterly on March 21, 2023
For most of her 74 years, Ruth Ann Hills took a certain innocent pride in her family’s story and its place in Staten Island history. Generations of her family had resided in Mariners Harbor on the island’s North Shore. She and her brother David Thomas live in the house their grandfather built on Van Pelt Avenue. They had found Black ancestors on Staten Island as far back as the 1700s, and incredibly they had all eluded slavery. Or so Hills thought. All of that changed one day in 2021, when Hills received a visit from a filmmaker. Heather Quinlan was working on a documentary about a nearby graveyard. Over the course of her genealogical research, Quinlan had discovered that one of the people buried there was Hills’ great-great-great-grandfather. Neither Hills nor Thomas had ever heard of the man, Benjamin Prine, but his death in 1900 at the age of 106 had been covered by the New York Times and the wire services. Prine, a U.S. veteran of the War of 1812, had been the last enslaved person born on Staten Island, Quinlan told them. A photograph of a man, seated, holding a cane. The photograph has a long caption beneath, that is headlined "THEY CAN'T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME." Hills' and Thomas' great-great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Prine. Staten Island Historical Society. Prine had once been enslaved by Peter Van Pelt, a highly influential Dutch Reformed Church minister – meaning that the street on which the siblings now live took its name from the same white family that enslaved their ancestor. “I thought I was a big history buff. ‘Oh, I know about history,’” Hills said. “I guess I was naive.” A crosswalk scene underneath two large street signs that both read "Van Pelt Av." The intersection of Van Pelt Avenue and Forest Avenue on Staten Island. Reece T. Williams/Gothamist

How the Remains of Formerly Enslaved People Came to Rest Beneath a Staten Island Strip Mall

Benjamin Prine's descendants didn’t know about their family ties – or their connection to his enslaver.
by Arun Venugopal via Gothamist on February 9, 2023
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