On September 7, 1889, a white mob broke into the Boone County Jail in Columbia, Missouri, seized a Black teenager named George Bush and hanged him from a second-story window of the county courthouse. Bush was just 17 or...
In October 1906, a wave of racial violence swept through Argenta, Arkansas, after a white farmer was shot and killed. Over the next four days, armed white mobs attacked Black residents, burned homes and businesses, and forced many families...
In the years before the American Civil War, slavery was not only defended by politicians and slaveholders. Some Christian ministers also built theological arguments around it, using the Bible to argue that slaveholding was compatible with Christianity. One of...
On this day in 1904, German General Lothar von Trotha issued an extermination order against the Herero people in German South West Africa, present-day Namibia. He ordered German troops to shoot any Herero found within German territory, including those...
In the late 16th century, when Portugal began pushing deeper into Angola, it turned to African military groups to help fight the powerful states of the interior. Among them were the Imbangala, whose warriors would eventually fight alongside the...
Ali Soilih was a Comorian president who attempted to transform his newly independent country through a radical socialist revolution. He challenged French influence, traditional Muslim customs and the authority of established elites. His policies won support among sections of...
When enslaved Africans were brought to the Americas, Christianity was gradually introduced into their lives. Missionaries preached to them, slaveholders encouraged religious instruction, and some enslaved people were baptized and became committed Christians. But an important question remains: did...
In December 1869, a young Black man named Cyrus Guy was taken by a white mob in Orange County, North Carolina, and lynched for allegedly insulting a white woman. There was no trial, no opportunity for Guy to defend...
In 1712, colonial South Carolina passed a law establishing increasingly severe punishments for enslaved people who repeatedly ran away. The law, titled “An ACT for the better ordering and governing of Negroes and Slaves,” treated escape as an offense...
In February 1763, enslaved Africans in Berbice, a Dutch colony in present-day Guyana, rose against the brutal plantation system that had kept them in bondage, launching one of the most significant slave revolts in 18th-century South America. What began...
