Thinking back on the exhibit, I love how the curators concluded it with a statement on Black people’s desire to control or reclaim the narrative about them.

For Jones and Allen, the problem was not a lack of information, but stubbornly partial accounts of that information.

Interposition was not a claim that state sovereignty could or should displace national authority, but a claim that American federalism needed to preserve some balance between state and national authority.

Jefferson’s system depended on shoring up the bulwarks of race and basing the law on a theory of government that withdrew the protection of government from unfavored groups.

When facilitated responsibly, historical role-play can be an invaluable educational method because it encourages empathy and taking ownership of one’s participation in the classroom.

Morton and his skull measurements have long been part of the scholarship on American racism, but what happens when we draw Audubon into the racial drama?

A review of Michael Drexler and Ed White’s recent collaboration, The Traumatic Colonel: The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr

Ultimately, my students and I had to consider how to make sense of the Douglass of the 1840s, who viewed the Constitution as a “covenant with death,” and the Douglass of the 1850s, who adhered to an antislavery reading of the Constitution.

I had a longtime fascination with both the Latter-Day Saints and the Inca Empire. To find this point of contact across centuries and hemispheres gave me something of the confused pleasure one feels on learning that two good friends know each other independently from oneself.

In this 1861 story, white society treats a teenaged African American postal rider with dignity and respect.

From Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century. Copyright 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.
Winner of the 2018 Children’s Literature Association’s Honor Book Award

“Most students recognize the value of having a textbook to provide an overview but see textbooks as boring, predigested, and avoiding all controversy.”

Does the creation of New York’s Colored Orphan Asylum suggest that race was irrelevant to nineteenth-century understandings of childhood?

In 1849, Benjamin F. Roberts, an African American shoemaker, filed suit against the Boston School Committee after they refused to […]

Tracing the intellectual and economic connections between Black women, Black data and colored conventions in the antebellum era.

In recovering the vibrant presence of Saint Domingue/Haiti in these American moments, both books exemplify the power and promise of adopting an Atlantic lens in telling a national story…each offers a new view onto the familiar landscape of American political development between the Revolution and Reconstruction.

In 1872, a small group of juvenile inmates challenged the terms of their incarceration, but even their modest success suggests the hazards of imagining children’s rights outside of human rights.

The book is both an intersectional study of crime and an intersectional study of gender, poverty, and class.

Thomas Crawford’s “Statue of Freedom”

When they arrived in Virginia, Africans joined a society that was divided between master and white servant, a society with such contempt for white servants that masters were not punished for beating them to death.

For the better part of a century, social historians have wrestled with the problem of the one and the many—that is […]

Yet it’s not at all clear what Thomas Jefferson’s political legacy, his racist writings, his slaveholding, his proclamations against slavery, his fear of miscegenation, and his (apparently) active miscegenation mean to us when taken together.

Among the library’s less heralded holdings are scores of volumes of community and parish records–including the revealing London list of burials mentioned above–major and minor manuscript collections (on paper or microfilm), and a substantial number of prints, paintings, maps, and other visual records, especially from the Renaissance but also before and after that era.

And then, I got hooked on Phillis Wheatley—even though I still wasn’t sure whether I liked her poetry or not.

The problem is an overdetermined interpretive frame that presumes that Hammon’s poems matter most only when they say something about slavery.

The enthusiasm some sailors showed for reproducing American racial spectacle overseas suggests not only their own warm embrace of the era’s popular theatre, but also their aspiration to familiarize foreign societies with the nation’s cultural landscape.

Sentimental reformist oration, fugitive confession, and the personal epistle are all represented in this text.

Although the film does effectively elicit laughs and outrage, its overall impact is less than the sum of its parts.

Union supporters created an “illusion of collective grief,” a perception that the entire nation—North and South, black and white—was unified in its response to Lincoln’s assassination.

Sponsored by The Chipstone Foundation.

What can making now tell us about the past? Or should the past remain untouched? 

It is exceedingly difficult to trace women, but particularly non-elite women of color, through the sources that are available.

When the ballots were certified on January 13, 1842, the people of Rhode Island found themselves with two constitutions.

An unlikely alliance in antebellum America

Once again abandoned by her husband and afflicted with uncertainty and poverty, Eunice began to direct her own life…

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

Early northern black church voting may be the missing link in our understanding of black political consciousness and civic mindedness.

During the course of the project, students began narrowing their research to topics that could be answered through the database. What was the racial and gender composition of the members of the various abolitionist groups? To what extent had both slavery and the slave trade flourished in Massachusetts?

Why does Uncle Tom grow old?

What falls within American Revolution scholarship? To what larger questions and themes should our more focused work speak?

Isn’t barbecue one of the few foods prepared and enjoyed by all Americans regardless of color?

Man is the only picture-making animal in the world. He alone of all the inhabitants of the earth has the […]

Jasmine Nichole Cobb views early photography as an especially potent visual technology for the expression of black agency.

By the summer of 1881, news of the recently discovered Luray Caverns in Virginia’s famed Shenandoah Valley had spread throughout […]

Did fugitive slaves find haven on naval ships? And […] could I trace the lives of some of the colored mariners I had identified from other sources?

Dred Scott did not intend to become famous.

Material culture interfered with the seemingly inexorable rise of racialism in Louisiana, creating its own chronology, and highlighting the uneven development and fractured character of the process of racialization in North America.

Wolf skillfully weaves together a narrative of Johnson’s life, tracing his triumphs and defeats as he sought both freedom and a meaningful place in his community of Warrenton, Virginia

By using legal knowledge as the central theme of the book, the author not only gives the reader guideposts that are easy to follow and remember, but also provides a blueprint for how some African Americans resisted racial degradation.

Manegold crafts a narrative not stuffed with jargon but filled with lively prose that not only links the reader to past events but illustrates their connection to modern-day issues.

A Letter to Jefferson from Monticello Westward the course of empire makes its way. —Bishop George Berkeley                     I I climbed […]

The Fabrication of American Literature is a long-overdue examination of the antebellum practice of “puffing” books, or shamelessly promoting them for […]

“As the best biography does, Winch’s portrait of Forten illuminates not only the man’s life but his times.”

Corinne T. Field, The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill, N.C.: […]

Miller’s book centers on the queerness of suffering, theorizing modes of abjection that destabilize and shift sexual and racial identifications.

Jenna M. Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760-1850. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University […]

What makes Harper’s January 31 [1867] lecture rare is that we have its full text. The Philadelphia Evening Telegraph printed a transcription of “National Salvation” the day after Harper spoke.

Jill McDonough explores the pains–explicit and suppressed–suffusing early American culture.

If there ever was a time when American media was unbiased, it was certainly not during the Revolutionary War.

Many of the essays in Dillon’s and Drexler’s book focus on incidents of “obscured interdependence,” moments when the United States’s very attempts to distance itself from Haiti reveal the presence of a deep and abiding, if disavowed, relationship between the revolutionary neighbors.

We talkwith Julia Gaffield about Haiti’s foreign relations in its early years of independence, the place of the Haitian Revolution, and the impact of the Haitian Declaration of Independence.

Winthrop’s 1861 novel is touted in 2016 as one of the queerest texts of the nineteenth century.

Attending to “the forms and institutional contexts” that characterized antebellum African American men’s writing, Pratt identifies a political-aesthetic project that he terms “stranger humanism.”

In taking seriously northern Republicans’ egalitarian ideals and the world-historical significance they attributed to the Union, Riley offers an important corrective to scholarship that exaggerates the political influence of racism.

The nervous system, in the nineteenth-century imaginary, was the point of contact between the mind and the world.

Looking for connections between various reform movements, rather than examining them as distinct entities, can reveal surprising convergences.

Slave status, in short, could be reaffixed based on the assumption that a former slave’s “consent” to travel back home reflected an “implied contract” to re-enter slavery.

The problem with the book is the exact opposite of a dubious or controversial thesis.

By dispensing with the notion that there is a master text or a master figure capable of standing for fugitive or free African America, Chaney’s analytic strategy parallels the experiences and perspectives of his subjects.

As an abolitionist lecturer, Harper honed to perfection a polemical political style that appears to differ with the seemingly sentimental and religious form of Forest Leaves.

The CCP is committed to making available historical Black activism because it speaks to issues that occupy today’s movements, today’s concerns, today’s changing same.

This project narrates the Colored Conventions Project’s work to transcribe, catalogue, and visualize the minutes of the nineteenth-century Colored Conventions.

Working with publishers, libraries, and archives, digital humanities projects can work to liberate African American history.

The minutes of Colored Conventions constitute one of the most important bodies of primary sources in African American history. The […]

Simpson weaves together a scrupulously researched and only lightly imagined twin narrative for his dual protagonists—one black and one white—as they lead lives that touch in profoundly different ways on the great issues of the United States’ first century

In Remembering the Civil War, Purdue University historian Caroline Janney challenges the prevailing narrative of Civil War memory, which contends […]

In the 1847 Grammar of the Mpongwe Language, principally authored by John Leighton Wilson, the American missionary to Gabon marveled […]

“Man,” wrote John Webb, a Boston-based minister, in a 1726 sermon, “conforms to the Tempers and Manners of the Company […]

Where and how to find the narrator, who was not only an escaped slave but an author with no name?

or, Please Don’t Accuse Me of Being Theodore Parker Incarnate Whenever I attend panels or professional conferences that are about […]

The Literary Paradises of Hurston and Bartram in a High School Curriculum Early American literature is not commonly taught at […]

American literature, culture, and ideals stand wounded because America has regularly asserted that some lives and literatures—especially Black lives and literatures—matter less than others.

As the preceding slides suggests, Confederate songsters did not shy away from “foreign” material. For instance, “Mary of Argyle” is […]

Given the facts, fiction and truths, what kind of autobiographical voice could I craft for the larger text that would establish the narrative provenance of a surviving pre-Civil War log cabin?

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“The fascination of American men of letters with Henry Moss, the African American seeming to turn white, however, mirrored their denial of the possibility that whites might turn black.”

One may still hear such wardrobes called “armers” in the Deep South, where they were ubiquitous in an era before built-in closets and pantries became de rigeur.

Seeing Lewis’s image I was immediately reminded of the importance of the visual—both for present-day scholars of African American life and culture and for those nineteenth-century freedom fighters who knew the visual field was a key site of struggle for representing the race.

As a professor in a law school, I should begin by stating that I am on record testifying that Professor […]

By the turn of the twentieth century, thinking about American Indians had become integral to German culture.

Dancers and musicians, who work primarily with physical knowledge and sensation, perceive jigs differently than historians who rely on written evidence.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“In denouncing drunkenness, “white middle-class men were engaged in a battle over gender identity that was not exclusively an attempt at class domination against working-class men.”

The anti-Indian sublime was as much about lambasting particular non-Indians as dividing whites from Indians.

The high cost of being poor in America

During the Revolution, allegations of rape by British soldiers in newspapers and pamphlets were construed as attacks on American rights, rather than as the violation of an individual.

This article is presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

“Who or what gave these metals . . . their peculiar qualities for serving as coined money?” asked A Currency Primer of 1896. “Men did not,” came the answer. “Law did not. Government could not. It was done by Nature.”

“[I]f Joss Whedon, spy in the house of love, isn’t willing or able to wrestle with the legacy of slavery, who is?”

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“Authenticity was always an important part of the freak show’s promotional rhetoric, which advertised exhibits as LIVE! TRUE! REAL! GENUINE! Despite such hyperbolic claims of veracity, the exotic act was the most easily and regularly fabricated of all attractions.”

African American worshippers were carefully responding and interacting with each other exactly because each individual was free to shape the collective sound.

My students and I had fun discussing political geography today.  For instance, take a look at these two maps side […]

When you encounter evidence of kinship between owners and slaves you have, first of all, learned something new about the complexity of their world, and next you are confronted with the question: did knowledge of his or her kinship to slaves influence the actions of an owner?

March 31, 2008 Barack Obama, Glenn Loury, and the American Historical Narrative Over at TPM Cafe, former black conservative Glenn […]

With history like this, I thought, who needs fiction?

In late December 2001, my husband Mark, kids Lily, Max, and Sam, and I were at the end of a […]

Sweet provides rich evidence of slaves running away and thus directing their resistance towards individual masters rather than the slave system itself, but he broadens this view by arguing that the general threat of slave revolt was partly directed at a complicit public that failed to recognize the rights of slaves.

Look at you: sitting there at your computer checking the weather reports, studying Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode guides, and reading […]

What better way to explore the bare essentials of the master-slave relationship than with the figure of the black slaveholder, who comes to slavery without the delusion of racial difference that divided white owners from their slaves?

Even into the twentieth century, I learned, Bethel’s Independence struck a nerve for some in the white community, while in the black community it remained a fiercely prideful monument of black uplift.

Parent turns to Marxist theory to structure his answer to the question of the origins of the slave system with markedly mixed results.

“Why this judgment about whether or not the participants really lived the life of 1883 homesteaders? Is the experiment a success if they feel as though they were homesteading or only if they convince the experts that they’d worked hard enough to survive the winter?”

“‘And in what walk of life, or dance of life does man ever get such stimulating applause as thunders about him, when, having danced his partner off her feet, and himself too, he finishes by leaping gloriously on the bar-counter, and calling for something to drink, with the chuckle of a million of counterfeit Jim Crows, in one inimitable sound!'”

“Memory is often owned, history interpreted. Memory is passed down through generations; history is revised.”

“Sobel’s book is notable in turning our attention back to a topic too long thought off limits to historians: the psychological origins of race and racism.”

“[S]erving in a patrol may have reaffirmed Southern notions of community, kinship, masculinity, and honor.”

A generation away from the Sans Souci, we try to talk about what we see at museums, historic sites, and monuments.

At the very least Linebaugh and Rediker break the tradition of treating mixed-race love as purely exploitative and herein lift such a union into a brave act of defiance.

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