When European powers carved Africa into colonies in the late nineteenth century, they faced an immediate economic problem: the people they intended to exploit had no reason to work for them. Africans across the continent were largely self-sufficient, farming...
In eighteenth century Britain, William Beckford stood among the most powerful men in London. He rose to become Lord Mayor twice, sat in Parliament, and built a public image as a defender of liberty. But behind his political fame...
In the decades before the American Civil War, many slaveholders defended slavery through politics, religion, and economics. Few did so more effectively than Thomas Roderick Dew. A professor at the College of William & Mary and later its president,...
Gungunhana, often called the Lion of Gaza, was one of the last major African rulers to resist European colonial conquest in southeastern Africa. He ruled the powerful Gaza Empire, which covered large parts of present-day Mozambique and portions of...
In 1829, a free Black abolitionist living in Boston published a pamphlet that would send waves of fear through parts of slaveholding America. It was not a government report, a newspaper investigation, or a speech from a famous politician....
In the early twentieth century, as the Herero and Nama genocide was still unfolding in German South West Africa, present-day Namibia, another form of violence was taking root across farms and settler communities. Among the men who would later...
In colonial Kenya during the 1950s, the British government built a vast network of detention camps to imprison Africans accused of resisting colonial rule. Hidden within the hills of Nyeri was one of those sites, Aguthi Concentration Camp, a...
In 1990, the Catholic Church declared Marie-Marguerite d’Youville a saint. Canonized by Pope John Paul II, she became the first Canadian born person to receive that honor, and today her name appears on churches, schools, charities, and universities across...
Ernest Ouandié was a Cameroonian teacher who left the classroom to join the struggle against French colonial rule in his country. As the fight for independence intensified, he became one of the most determined leaders resisting French domination and...
The Second Middle Passage was the forced relocation of enslaved Africans and African Americans from the Upper South to the expanding cotton plantations of the Deep South after the Atlantic slave trade ended in 1808. Through the domestic slave...
