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...
The Society for the Conversion of Negro Slaves was a British missionary organization established in the late 18th century, under the leadership of Anglican Bishop Beilby Porteus. Its primary aim was to replace African spiritual beliefs with Christian doctrines...
On October 18, 1933, George Armwood, a 23-year-old African American labourer, was lynched in Princess Anne, Maryland, in what would be the last recorded lynching in the state. Like many before him, Armwood’s death was not the result of...
In the brutal world of slavery, where whips tore skin and families were auctioned, and bred like cattle, the most powerful weapon wasn’t always the lash, it was the Bible. Through sermons, laws, and redacted scripture, Christianity which was...
The term “fancy girls” refers to light-skinned enslaved biracial or african girls who were sold for the purpose of sexual exploitation and concubinage during the antebellum period in the United States.
These young girls, many of them barely into their...
In the year 1883, as European empires tightened their grip on Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium issued a letter to colonial missionaries that would later come to symbolize the most chilling fusion of religious evangelism and imperial conquest....
King Toera was the last independent ruler of the Menabe region in western Madagascar who was executed by French colonial forces in 1897 during their conquest of the island. After initially extending hospitality to the French, he was met...
