Frederick Douglass

Not since Reconstruction has there been such an opportunity for the advancement of racial justice.

The Great Emancipator's character and anti-slavery legacy has been questioned by Black Americans for over a century.

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.

Who tells our stories has always mattered.

The movement for racial equality echoes the vision of the “August First Day” holiday.

Black people suffer disproportionately from police violence. But white skin does not provide immunity.

The long history behind the Army's Jim Crow forts.

Black abolitionist David Ruggles opened the first Black-owned bookstore in 1834, pointing the way to freedom—in more ways than one.

It is fair to ask whether Grant’s prewar experiences define the entirety of his character, and who sets the bar for which public figures deserve commemoration.

Photographer Drew Gardner painstakingly recreates the images with the notable figures' descendants.

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.

How African-Americans in Early America celebrated the Declaration of Independence's ideals, even as basic freedoms were denied to them.

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?

Why Southerners protesting structural racism in the criminal justice system have turned time and again to the monuments in their communities.

The paper’s series on slavery made avoidable mistakes. But the attacks from its critics are much more dangerous.

On Hosea Easton’s and David Walker’s attempts to debunk scientific racism.

What the president understood that the zealous Republican reformers in Congress didn’t.

The Editor of the American Historical Review weighs in on recent historiographical debates around the New York Times' 1619 Project.

Activists and preservationists are changing the kinds of places that are protected—and what it means to preserve them.