Thousands of enslaved Africans were imprisoned inside the dark underground dungeons of Cape Coast Castle in colonial Ghana before being forced onto slave ships crossing the Atlantic. Directly above one of those dungeons stood the Church of England Chapel,...
The Massasoit Guards were an African American militia company founded in Boston in 1854 to help protect the city’s Black community from slave catchers during the years leading up to the American Civil War. Formed by Black abolitionists at...
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...
