During the final years of British colonial rule in Kenya, a vast network of concentration camps was created to imprison Africans suspected of fighting against colonial rule or supporting the Mau Mau. Among these camps, one became notorious for...
In the years after the American Civil War, the United States entered the Reconstruction era, when formerly enslaved Africans began gaining rights that had long been denied to them. In 1868, a new constitution in Georgia granted Black men...
In the late nineteenth century, European powers rushed to take control of African territory in what historians later called the Scramble for Africa. Soldiers and guns would eventually play a major role in that conquest. But before armies arrived,...
In the history of American slavery, some slaveholders are remembered not because of the wealth they accumulated but because of the suffering they inflicted on the Africans they enslaved. One such figure was “Big Jim” McClain, a slave master...
In 1794, a Portuguese slave ship with the biblical name Saint Joseph (São José Paquete Africa) sank off the coast of present-day South Africa while carrying hundreds of captive Africans to Brazil. The wreck occurred near the Cape of...
In 1979, W. Arthur Lewis made history when he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for pioneering research on economic development in emerging countries. With this award, he became the first Black person ever to win a...
In August 1823, one of the largest uprisings of enslaved Africans in the British Caribbean unfolded in the colony of Demerara-Essequibo, part of what is now Guyana. Known to history as the Demerara Rebellion, the event involved between 10,000...
The history of slavery in the United States is often told through economics, labor, and politics, but one of the most intimate and horrifying dimensions of the system was the exploitation of Black women’s reproductive capacities. They were forced...
The Danane concentration camp was an Italian colonial prison near Mogadishu, established after Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia. It held thousands of East Africans who had resisted Italian rule, including fighters, community leaders, and civilians. Life in the camp was...
The lynching of Jesse Washington on May 15, 1916, remains one of the most horrific and Well Documented Lynchings in American history. It took place in Waco, Texas, a city that at the time prided itself on being progressive,...
