W.E.B. Du Bois

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

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

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

Jacob Lawrence was one of twentieth-century America’s most celebrated black artists.

A review of Robert Elder's new biography of John C. Calhoun.

How statistics were used in the urban North to condemn Blackness as inherently criminal.

Born enslaved, he was elected to Congress in the wake of the Civil War. But the impact of this momentous step in U.S. race relationships did not last long.

Faulkner’s chroniclers have to reconcile the novelist’s often repellent political positions with the extraordinary meditations on race, violence, and cruelty in his fiction.

Centrist Democrats who blamed the left for election losses would do well to remember the people who have fought for and shaped the party’s history.

Radical Black thinkers have long argued that racial slavery created its own unique form of American fascism.

Joel Rhone reviews Eddie Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

It helped erode discrimination but also upheld racial prejudice.

Why did the historian come to fear the very movements he once would have celebrated?

Saidiya Hartman’s "Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments" is a strike against the archives’ silence regarding the lives of Black women in the shadow of slavery.

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

One idea inherited from 1960s radicalism is that of “white privilege,” a protean concept invoked to explain wealth, political power, and even cognition.

As we mine the 1940s for alternate visions of international order, we must not presume that the US remains the benevolent center of global politics.

How today's protests are struggling to reclaim the vision of the great abolitionist leader.

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

In 1920, like 2020, race became the pivot of a historic turning point.