Elijah Parish Lovejoy was a white preacher with a printing press and a dangerous habit, telling the truth about slavery. In 1837, a mob stormed the warehouse where he kept his press. He stood his ground, they shot him...
When the United States Congress voted to abolish the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, many hoped it would signal a decline in the horrors of slavery. But instead of ending human bondage, this legal milestone gave rise to one...
During slavery in America, one of the most dangerous acts for a Black person, especially an enslaved one, was to preach the gospel without white supervision. While Christianity was widely promoted among enslaved Africans by white slaveholders, it was...
On 22 July 1921, in the mountainous terrain of northeastern Morocco, the Spanish Empire suffered its most devastating military defeat in modern history, the Battle of Annual. Fought between the Spanish Army and the Riffian Berbers during the Rif...
J. Marion Sims was a 19th-century American physician who came to be celebrated as the “father of modern gynecology.” But behind his medical legacy lies a deeply disturbing truth. Sims built his reputation by experimenting on enslaved Black women...
The Jesus Maria was a Spanish slave ship operating in the early 19th century during the height of the transatlantic slave trade. Named after two of Christianity’s most sacred figures, Jesus and Mary, the ship was anything but holy....
Léon Rom was a Belgian colonial officer who served in the Congo Free State during the late 19th century and became notorious for his brutality. As a commander in King Leopold II’s Force Publique, Rom reportedly decorated his station...
George Whitefield is remembered as one of the most influential preachers of the 18th century. A co-founder of Methodism alongside John and Charles Wesley and a major force in the First Great Awakening, Whitefield’s legacy is often told as...
Throughout the brutal centuries of American slavery, resistance was as common as the oppression itself. Enslaved Africans did not passively accept their bondage; they rebelled, sometimes in open defiance, other times in carefully organized revolts that struck at the...
In late January 1934, Robert Johnson, a 40-year-old Black man, was wrongly arrested for assaulting a white woman in Tampa, Florida. Although the police eventually cleared him of any involvement, a white mob seized him and lynched him before...
