For the millions of Africans brought to the Americas in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, the Bible occupied a paradoxical place. In the hands of enslavers, it became a tool of control, a weapon wielded to justify cruelty...
In nineteenth-century Europe, Africans were rare sights in royal courts, and when present, they were often treated less as ordinary people and more as symbols of curiosity and status. One such figure was John Panzio, an African man who...
On December 26, 1921, while much of white America was still in the afterglow of Christmas, Bill McAllister lay dead in Florence County, South Carolina, his body riddled with bullets. His crime was not proven murder, not theft, not...
For millions of enslaved Africans in the Americas, Christmas was not simply a religious holiday or a brief pause in labor. It was a calculated opportunity. Across plantations in the United States, the Caribbean, and other slave societies, enslaved...
Rev. Thornton Stringfellow was the pastor of Stevensburg Baptist Church in Culpeper County, Virginia, and one of the most notorious defenders of slavery in antebellum America. While he also promoted Sunday Schools, and domestic missions, his enduring legacy is...
During the Jim Crow era, segregation depended on strict racial categories: a person was either Black or white, inferior or superior, barred or welcomed. Rev. Jesse Routte exposed the idiocy of that system in a remarkable way, not through...
William Byrd II was one of colonial Virginia’s most powerful men. He was wealthy, educated, politically connected, and widely respected among the white ruling class. He helped found Richmond and Petersburg, served on the Virginia Governor’s Council for decades,...
In the history of global exploration, names such as Leif Ericson, Marco Polo, and Henry Hudson are the first to pop into our minds. However, one relevant explorer that accomplished similar feats is all but unknown today. He is...
Gert Schramm was born on 28 November 1928 in Erfurt, Thuringia, into a Germany that would later criminalize his very existence. He was the son of Marianne Schramm, a German woman, and Jack Brankson, an African American engineer working...
Quamina Gladstone was an African-born enslaved man in British Demerara (modern-day Guyana) whose religious leadership and moral authority placed him at the center of one of the most significant slave uprisings in British colonial history. A carpenter by trade...
