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...
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...
The American West was a rough place where law and order were often difficult to maintain. Outlaws moved across vast territories, and many areas had little protection from crime. In this environment, a few lawmen became known for their...
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...
The Second Middle Passage was the forced relocation of enslaved Africans and African Americans from the Upper South to the expanding cotton plantations of the Deep South after the Atlantic slave trade ended in 1808. Through the domestic slave...
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...
In slaveholding societies across the Americas, religion shaped daily life and plantation authority. Slaveholders attended church and often claimed their power over enslaved Africans was ordained by God. Within this environment, the Bible was used not only as a...
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...
The story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings stands at the center of one of the clearest contradictions in American history. Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal,” yet he enslaved hundreds of people at his Monticello estate....
