Peter Randolph was born into slavery in Virginia but rose to become one of New England’s most respected Black ministers. His 1893 autobiography, From Slave Cabin to the Pulpit, recounts his journey from slavery to freedom, his legal fight...
Among the many forgotten names buried in America’s history of slavery, few stories are as disturbing as that of Ginger Pop, an enslaved African man whose life ended brutally on a Louisiana plantation in 1853. His death, and the...
In the afternoon of February 15, 1851, inside a federal courthouse, an enslaved African man named Shadrach Minkins, who had escaped slavery in Virginia less than a year earlier, was being held under the infamous Fugitive Slave Act of...
Edmund Ruffin was a Virginia planter, politician, and fierce pro-slavery advocate, who spent his life defending the Confederacy and the institution of slavery. When the Civil War ended in 1865, the South lay in ruins, millions of enslaved Black...
The transatlantic slave trade was one of history’s darkest enterprises, carrying millions of Africans across the ocean in brutal conditions to serve as labor in the Americas. The ships that ferried them were not just centers of commerce but...
In his 1956 classic The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, historian Kenneth M. Stampp shattered the myth of slavery as a gentle system. Using plantation records, letters, and slave narratives, he revealed that white enslavers deliberately sought...
Harriet Jacobs’ story is one of the most extraordinary acts of survival in American history. To escape her master’s relentless sexual abuse and also slavery, she spent seven years hiding in a tiny attic, unable to stand or move...
During slavery in America, religion was often used as a tool of control. Many preachers visited plantations to tell enslaved Africans to obey their masters and accept their suffering as God’s will. But Freeborn Garrettson, a Methodist preacher from...
Jean-Baptiste de Caradeux de La Caye remains one of the most despised figures in the history of French Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, though today few know his name. Born in Saint-Domingue but educated in France, Caradeux returned to the Caribbean...
When the US entered World War II in 1941, Americans were called to do their part for the war effort. Factories shifted production to weapons, families rationed food, and ordinary people were urged to donate blood for wounded soldiers....
