The US has a centuries-old tradition of killing black people without repercussion – and of publicly viewing the violence. Spreading those images can disrespect the dead and traumatize viewers.
A group of leading black, queer and feminist academics held a colloquium to reconsider a seminal blackness studies text – offering new ways of thinking about the decolonial project.
Harriet Jacobs, writer of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
Wikimedia
Despite the fact that only 38% of Americans say they think the Democratic and Republican parties are doing ‘an adequate job,’ they’re unlikely to disappear.
Reenactment of 1811 German Coast Uprising.
Soul Brother
A reenactment of the largest slave rebellion in US history involves a plot twist. A scholar who studies race, history and memory says the new ending can spark new beginnings.
Union dead at Gettysburg, July 1863.
National Archives, Timothy H. O'Sullivan photographer
A growing chorus of people say the US has never been so politically divided. A Civil War historian reminds readers that there was once a far more divided time.
Centuries’ worth of important information is stored on paper – which can decay, burn or get eaten by pests. Peek inside the process of making all that data digital.
Many African Americans made education a high priority after the Civil War.
National Museum of African American History and Culture
Many historians and other scholars say what Americans have traditionally learned about the complex period that followed the Civil War falls short of what we should know.
Networks of support in solidarity of migrants on the move have grown across Europe and North America.
L.M. for Moving Europe, 2015
After several decades in which many housewives turned their backs on slave sugar, it suddenly made a comeback.
Jermone Bias and Cheyney McKnight portraying enslaved cooks at Belle Grove Plantation in Middletown, Virginia, a National Park Service property.
National Park Service
At historic sites across the South, you’ll often find a white woman, dressed in Colonial clothes, cooking in a big house kitchen. That’s a role that was usually done by enslaved Africans.
Christmas tours to mansions often present a ‘magical’ experience to tourists, but they ignore the realities of the lives of slaves who worked there.
Shreveport-Bossier Convention and Tourist Bureau/Flickr
Fictional accounts of white Southerners make it seem like it was fun to be a slave on a plantation at holiday time. Many of today’s tours repeat such stories.