Frederick Douglass

A new history charts the radical agitation around Black rights and freedom back to the early nineteenth century. 

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.

1619, 1776, and the politics of the past.

John Marshall Harlan's relationship with an enslaved man who grew up in his home showed how respect could transcend barriers and point a path to freedom.

Fixating on Black vaccine skepticism obscures a rich history of Black medical and scientific innovation.

A new book tells the forgotten story of fugitive slaves who found freedom south of the border.

Why are Chicago’s race riots of 1919 overlooked in the city’s collective memory? A new project tells the stories of the 38 killed, and the legacy of racism in the U.S.

A new biography details the cultural jumble of literature, dirty jokes, and everything in between that went into the making of the foremost self-made American.

If we don’t understand the history of Asian exclusion, we cannot understand the racist hatred of the present.

In the decades after the Civil War, Black Americans warned of the dangers of Confederate monuments.

When Tuskegee student Sammy Younge, Jr., was murdered in 1966, his classmates focused their righteous anger on a local monument.

Emilio Sanchez and the British government fought the lucrative business as American authorities looked the other way.

Thaddeus Stevens understood far better than most that fully uprooting slavery meant overthrowing the South’s economic system and challenging property rights.

Even after slave trade was banned, the United States and New York City, in particular, were complicit in allowing it to persist.

At the height of the Reconstruction, the pressing issue of the election was Black male suffrage.

The pervasive mythmaking about the supposed wisdom of the founders has covered up a central truth: the US Constitution is an antidemocratic mess.

The story of America can be told through the story of its periodicals.

His defiance changed baseball and helped assert Black people’s worth in American culture.

The Federal Writers’ Project narratives provide an all-too-rare link to our past.

To preserve Black history, a 19th-century archivist filled hundreds of scrapbooks with newspaper clippings and other materials.