Uzonna Anele

Throughout the Atlantic slave world, slaveholders often promoted Christianity among enslaved Africans believing religion would encourage obedience, humility, and submission. Plantation owners funded chapels, welcomed missionaries, and encouraged Bible teaching partly because they believed Christian instruction would make enslaved...

In the early nineteenth century, European audiences gathered to stare at a young African woman whose body had been turned into a spectacle. She was advertised, examined, and reduced to an object of curiosity. That woman was Sarah Baartman,...

In the mid nineteenth century, when slavery still dominated much of the United States, a small number of Black professionals began using the law to fight the system. One of the most remarkable among them was Robert Morris, a...

Church was a formerly enslaved man who rose to become one of the first Black millionaires in American history. In an era when racial violence was common and Black Americans were largely shut out of wealth and power, he...

In early 1861, as the United States moved toward civil war, a respected rabbi in New York shocked many Americans when he opened the Bible and argued that slavery was allowed by God. In a sermon that quickly spread...

When slavery ended in the United States in 1865, nearly four million formerly enslaved Africans faced the enormous task of building new lives in a society that had long denied them freedom, education, and economic opportunity. Freedom did not...

In the early twentieth century, as European powers tightened their grip on Africa, Italy set its sights on Libya. After invading the region in 1911, Italian forces began a harsh campaign to turn the country into a colony. Among...

During the era of slavery in the Americas, many slaveholders encouraged enslaved Africans to adopt Christianity. Missionaries and pastors often preached to enslaved communities because slaveholders believed religion would make them more obedient. However, while enslaved Africans were encouraged...

George William Gordon is remembered today as one of Jamaica’s national heroes, but in his own lifetime he was viewed by the colonial authorities as a dangerous critic of British rule. His arrest and execution in 1865, during the...

Rodolfo Graziani was one of the most violent figures produced by European colonialism in Africa. An Italian general and senior official under Benito Mussolini, he became notorious for directing mass killings, chemical warfare, and terror campaigns during Italy’s invasion...