History also changes because of strange, flawed, deeply human people doing unremarkable, tedious, and often boring work.

When looking closer at the presence of marine specimens at American anti-slavery fairs, it becomes clear that these objects were more than items of natural curiosity. 

This is the story of how a visit by Frederick Douglass to south-central Massachusetts, its leadup and aftermath, epitomizes the movement’s ability to spread in the region.

Not only was women’s and African Americans’ public leadership new and controversial, but also, well into the 1800s, Black and white women didn’t typically cooperate in charitable activity or reform efforts.

Cridge’s American utopia did not singularly hinge on technological innovation or economic equality. It was a comprehensive achievement that combined political and economic equality with women’s autonomy and health.

While Poe was likely using opium, the efforts to keep him quiet suggest that he was also drinking.

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

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

Cartoonists manipulated the meaning of the revolution metaphor for their own mischievous designs.

But the nature of woman’s role in the destiny of expanding America, for Farnham, presented its own dilemmas. What exactly is required of Woman to take up this profound, national responsibility?

John Stewart sat hunched in the wooden cage that swung from the ship’s horizontal mainyard, riding out a storm off […]

Courtroom Drama, Constitutional Crisis and the Southern Quest to Nationalize Slavery

Though it would take weeks to sort through the wreckage, it was immediately clear that the fire had caused casualties on a scale previously unimaginable.

As we Americans acquired a greater share of the world’s wealth and power, we internalized the bizarre claim, loosely derived from covenantal theology, that God blesses our nation with exclusive fervor.

An unlikely alliance in antebellum America

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

Greaves and his circle adopted a regimen aimed at the reformation of mankind quite literally through the reformation of eating.

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

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

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

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.

How did a working-class drunkard with little formal education become a narrator of hard times to society at large?

This coin box was created by the Board of Managers of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (MASS) in late 1839 to […]

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.”

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

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