Frederick Douglass

The Underground Railroad conductor's understanding of botany, wildlife biology, geography and astronomy allowed her to guide herself and others to safety.

From Phillis Wheatley to Lil Uzi Vert, Black names and their evolution tell the story of America.

Roscoe Conkling was a successful politician and an able lawyer. But the colorful and irascible senator had no desire to serve on the high court.

The most influential preacher in the country, Beecher aggressively agitated for the Union to extend complete forgiveness to Confederates.

As Frederick Douglass’s master put it, a slave who learned to read and write against the will of his master was tantamount to “running away with himself.”

Political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. discusses his new memoir.

On the devout abolitionists who excoriated American exceptionalism.

The erasure of Black leaders from the most misunderstood period in American history.

'Did slavery make home always somewhere else?'

Politics have diluted King's dream.

The Washington Post has compiled the first database of slaveholding members of Congress by examining thousands of census records and historical documents.

The temperance movement wasn’t an example of American exceptionalism; it was a globe-spanning network of activists and politicians against economic exploitation.

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.