For decades in the mid 19th century, a brick slave jail in Lynchburg, Virginia, functioned as one of the busiest holding points in the domestic slave trade of the Upper South. Enslaved Africa men, women, and children were confined...
Throughout American history, politicians, plantation owners, lawyers, and religious leaders all offered different arguments in defense of slavery. Some claimed it was necessary for the economy, while others argued that it maintained social order. Few, however, relied as heavily...
In eighteenth century Britain, William Beckford stood among the most powerful men in London. He rose to become Lord Mayor twice, sat in Parliament, and built a public image as a defender of liberty. But behind his political fame...
In the decades before the American Civil War, many slaveholders defended slavery through politics, religion, and economics. Few did so more effectively than Thomas Roderick Dew. A professor at the College of William & Mary and later its president,...
Rebecca Latimer Felton remains one of the most contradictory figures in American history. She is often remembered as the first woman to serve in the United States Senate. Conversely, that milestone sits beside a far darker reality. Felton was...
In the early years of British colonial rule in Uganda, resistance was not uncommon. Across the protectorate, communities reacted in different ways to the growing reach of colonial authority. Among the most significant of these early acts of defiance...
Few historical figures are as complex and controversial as Bartolomé de las Casas. Celebrated as one of the earliest defenders of Indigenous rights in the Americas, he spent much of his life condemning Spanish brutality against Native peoples. Yet...
In 1846, a free Black abolitionist named Moses Dickson founded a secret organization known as the Knights of Liberty. The group's goal was ambitious and dangerous: to organize enslaved and free African Americans across the South and prepare for...
Christianity reached enslaved Africans inside a system that carefully managed not only their labor, but also their access to ideas. The result was not a full encounter with scripture, but a controlled version of it, shaped by what plantation...
In September 1887, British officials invited king Jaja, the powerful ruler of Opobo in present-day Nigeria, to what appeared to be a diplomatic meeting aboard a British vessel. Instead of negotiations, he was arrested. Within days, the king who...
