The transatlantic slave trade was one of history’s darkest enterprises, carrying millions of Africans across the ocean in brutal conditions to serve as labor in the Americas. The ships that ferried them were not just centers of commerce but...
The Robert Charles riots of 1900, remain one of the most violent and racially charged events in New Orleans history. The conflict began after African-American laborer Robert Charles was confronted by police whose provocative tactics and heavy-handed enforcement led...
Long before European ships anchored on the southern coast of Africa, the San people, hunter-gatherers whose ancestors had lived in the region for tens of thousands of years, roamed the open plains freely. They were among the earliest inhabitants...
The Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 was one of the most important and tragic events in Jamaica’s history. It began in the small parish of St. Thomas-in-the-East, where years of poverty, unfair laws, and racism had pushed people to...
The John Rankin House in Ripley, Ohio, is a historic brick home that played an important role in the Underground Railroad during the early 19th century. More than just a residence, it became one of the earliest and most...
In his 1956 classic The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, historian Kenneth M. Stampp shattered the myth of slavery as a gentle system. Using plantation records, letters, and slave narratives, he revealed that white enslavers deliberately sought...
In the late 18th century, when enslaved Africans in America were forbidden to gather without white supervision, Andrew Bryan defied the law to preach the gospel. For daring to do so, he was brutally whipped and imprisoned, yet he...
In the early 1800s, deep in the American South where slavery and superstition ruled side by side, an enslaved man named Jack Macon became a legend. Known across Tennessee as “Doctor Jack,” he was no ordinary slave. Though legally...
Rosa Lee Ingram was a widowed African American mother of twelve children and a hardworking sharecropper who lived in the deep South during one of the harshest times for Black women in America. In the 1940s, her name became...
In February 1766, the Indian Ocean became the stage of one of the most remarkable revolts in the history of the transoceanic slave trade. Aboard the Dutch slave ship Meermin, Malagasy captives rose against their Dutch enslavers in a...
