William Lloyd Garrison

James Oakes’s deeply researched book argues that two very different readings of the 1787 charter put the United States on a course of all but inevitable conflict.

A new biography of William Still show how the abolitionist documented the underground railroad as he helped people through it.

What the story of the Grimke family tells us about race in the United States.

A popular writer’s 1829 self-help book ‘The Frugal Housewife’ was based on the same democratic principles that made her a champion of the abolitionist cause.

A new biography explores the work of the influential abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, who wrote about the social, political, and cultural issues of her time.

Tying the fight for equal rights to the founders and the Constitution has worked before.

A new book examines the ways white slaveholders were compensated, while formerly enslaved people were not.

Why have historians overlooked the connections between abolitionism and the famous New England cultural movement?

On the devout abolitionists who excoriated American exceptionalism.

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

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.

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.

In his new book, The Crooked Path to Abolition, James Oakes argues that the Constitution was an antislavery document.

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

A favorite icon of critical race theory proponents doesn’t say what they want him to say.

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.

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.

Lovejoy, who ran a weekly paper called the Observer, was repeatedly targeted by mobs over his persistent writings against slavery.

An activist, writer, doctor and intellectual, James McCune Smith, born enslaved, directed his talents to the eradication of slavery.