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....
On August 8, 1946, just one year after returning home from serving his country in World War II, United States Army Corporal John Cecil Jones was tortured and lynched by a white mob near Minden, Webster Parish, Louisiana. He...
The scramble auction was one of the most inhumane and chaotic forms of selling enslaved Africans during the transatlantic slave trade. This method of auction had a fixed price system: every captive cost the same, no bidding allowed. That...
Dred Scott was an enslaved African man in the United States who became the central figure in one of the most infamous Supreme Court cases in American history, Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). His life began in bondage, and...
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...
