Abraham Lincoln

In our current politics we must be attentive to how talk of American freedom has long been connected to the presumed right of whites to dominate everyone else.

The document counted my great-great-grandfather as 3/5 of a free person. But the Framers don’t own the version we live by today. We do.

Newly added to Netflix, the Civil War movie reminds the nation that black Americans fought for their own emancipation.

Moral complexity may be an argument against unthinking iconoclasm. It is not, however, an argument for never taking down statues.

The confluence of Black and Indigenous history at Bdote.

Why secession, separatism, and disunion are the most American of values.

Dorsey and Thomas amassed important collections at a time when the future of chattel slavery and Black life hung in the balance of a national quarrel.

"No one story can completely explain Annie."

A review of Eric Foner's The Second Founding.

157 years after the famous battle, Gettysburg endured another invasion.

Worried that the presidential power to undo convictions can be taken too far? Look no further than Lincoln’s successor.

In 1860, a novel paramilitary-style organization mobilized hundreds of thousands against the Southern planter class.

How a monument that championed black sacrifice in the name of emancipation was forgotten.

The Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., has become a flashpoint in today’s reckoning with racist statues.

Historical narratives of the United States have never not been shaped by an anxiety about the end of it all. Are we a new Rome or a new Zion?

The National Statuary Collection announced the unification of the former slave economy’s emotional heartland with the heart of national government.

Keep in mind what it meant to the people who created it.

An Illinois high school teacher explains how his state complicates the binary of “free states” and “slave states.”

What would it mean to define the Civil War as a necessary and crucial final step in the long, even more tragic history of slavery in America?

Contrary to the image of the kneeling slave, Black abolitionists did not wait passively for the "Day of Jubilee." They led the charge.