John Brown

Eugene Debs’s unswerving commitment to democracy and internationalism was born out of his revulsion at the tyranny of industrial capitalism.

Wielding the outside agitator trope has always, at bottom, been a way of putting dissidents in their place.

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.

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

Rethinking our historical monuments.

How did the struggle for emancipation become a mass politics?

Stephen Vincent Benét’s lost epic “John Brown’s Body” envisions a nation sutured together after the Civil War, but fails to reckon with the war’s causes.

Robin D.G. Kelley on the predecessors to Antifa.

On the integrated Union regiments composed of white, black, and native men who fought in the Civil War's western theatre.

How the territory became the frontline of the battle for abolition.

A towering new biography of the great American orator and public intellectual Frederick Douglass.

Predictions of society coming undone reflect deep anxieties over the divisions roiling the country, but these professed fears about our future actually provide hope.

Yes, honorable men can fight for dishonorable causes.

Like the abolitionists of yesteryear, white Americans who oppose racial oppression deserve to be remembered and emulated.

A new book argues that Darwin failed to capture the American imagination because of the untimely death of Henry David Thoreau.

Subterranean metaphors have been a powerful tool of political resistance. Today, is there anywhere left to hide?

For some time now, the answer has not been the abolitionists.

The movement finally gets the big, bold history it deserves.

Migration further west began almost immediately after Reconstruction ended, as Black Americans initiated the "Great Exodus" outside the South toward Kansas.

The 1776 Declaration was only the first. What we learn from the long history of splinter constitutions, manifestos, and secessions that followed.