Frederick Douglass

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.

While he opposed slavery and southern secession early in his career, as president Andrew Johnson turned out to be an unsightly bigot.

Refusing myths of joy and pain in slave narratives.

How a story told by a fugitive from slavery became a parable of American banking gone bad.

The debate once again centers on — and stokes — White parents’ anxieties.

In 1850s Vermont, Achsa Sprague swore that the spirits who helped her walk again also possessed her with a crucial mission: freeing every soul in America.

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.

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

Historians have demonstrated how central racism has been to the formation of the U.S. But many of those same ideas have also been vital to combating white supremacy.

If colorblindness rests on the claim that the civil rights movement changed everything, the idea that racism is in our DNA borders on a fatalistic proposition that it changed nothing.

The island was once a place of working-class ingenuity and Black daring.

We know why they were built and why they have to come down.

For Ralph Waldo Emerson, political activism was full of empty gestures done in bad faith. Abolition called for true heroism.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition offered him a chance to present the dramatic gains made by Black Americans since the end of slavery.

Leading conservative pundits today are pounding themes that were popular among opponents of Reconstruction.

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

Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District was razed by the federal government 65 years ago. Now developers are testing the question of how to correct for a racist past.

This year’s Juneteenth commemorations must take a deeper look at the history of Black self-liberation to understand what emancipation really means.