Samory Touré was an African king who built the powerful Wassoulou Empire across parts of present-day Guinea, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone and Burkina Faso. For roughly 17 years, he resisted French colonial expansion through military resistance, diplomacy and...
History remembers empire-builders in different ways. Some are celebrated in statues and street names. Others are remembered, when they are remembered at all, for the suffering they left behind. Gustav Adolf von Götzen belongs firmly to the second group....
William Henry Brisbane Sr. was a Baptist pastor in the slaveholding South who built his life on enslaved labor before turning against the very system that enriched him. In a society where slavery was deeply accepted, even among religious...
Few figures in world history changed events as dramatically as Toussaint Louverture. Born enslaved in the French colony of Saint Domingue, he rose from bondage to become the most important leader of the Haitian Revolution, the only large scale...
In the early nineteenth century United States, being legally free did not always mean being safe. For thousands of free Black Americans living in border regions, freedom existed under constant threat from kidnapping rings that supplied enslaved labor to...
The Igbo Landing event stands out in the history of American slavery because it was not a typical plantation revolt, escape attempt, or organized military insurrection. Instead, they rebelled against slavery in the most final way, walking into the...
On January 8, 1811, along the sugar plantations of Louisiana’s German Coast, enslaved Africans rose up in one of the boldest acts of resistance in American history. Led by Charles Deslondes, the uprising would become the largest slave rebellion...
Andrew Watson was a Scottish footballer who made history as the world’s first Black international football player and captain. Playing for Scotland between 1881 and 1882, he was a pioneer in the sport, achieving success at a time when...
For the millions of Africans brought to the Americas in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, the Bible occupied a paradoxical place. In the hands of enslavers, it became a tool of control, a weapon wielded to justify cruelty...
In July 1849, Charleston’s Workhouse, a city-run prison for enslaved Africans, erupted in a desperate, violent revolt. It was here, in a place designed to crush every ounce of freedom, that Nicholas Kelly led an uprising that became one...
