The image of a kneeling person in chains was first used in a seal commissioned by the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, established by English Quakers in 1787.
Is American democracy an ‘experiment’ in the bubbling-beakers-in-a-laboratory sense of the word? If so, what is the experiment attempting to prove, and how will we know if and when it has succeeded?
On the 160th anniversary of the Civil War’s Battle of Gettysburg, a political scientist finds that residents of formerly Confederate states express greater support for political violence than others.
Former enslaved persons have never received a dime for their labor. Nor have their descendants received reparations for the legacy of slavery.
Should the descendants be paid? By whom and how much?
Known as the military leader who saved America, Ulysses S. Grant left a legacy of fighting for the rights of enslaved people during and after the Civil War.
Virtue signaling is designed to communicate specifically to one partisan tribe and to affirm its moral superiority. A scholar of ethics and politics explains why that is unwelcome in a divided US.
Known as Juneteenth in Texas, Emancipation Days symbolized America’s attempt to free the enslaved across the nation. But those days were unable to prevent new forms of economic slavery.
With a few notable exceptions, public monuments across the United States are overwhelmingly white and male. A movement is slowly growing to tell a more inclusive history of the American experience.
The pandemic changed people’s dining-out experience, with takeout becoming more common. But since dining out became fashionable in the 18th century, how and where people go to eat has been evolving.
Anne C. Bailey, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Former enslaved persons never got ‘forty acres and a mule,’ and their descendants have been denied reparations for the legacy of slavery. Will Joe Biden be the president to change that?
History is full of examples of nations paying out to compensate for slavery. But the money never went to those who suffered under the system, only those who profited.
President Lincoln was a statesman. John Brown was a radical. That’s the traditional view of how each one fought slavery, but it fails to capture the full measure of their devotion.
Much as the South rejected President Lincoln’s election with a massive armed uprising, could President Trump’s many supporters rise up and overthrow a Biden-led government?
On Nov. 7, when President-elect Joe Biden urged in his address that we “give each other a chance,” his words summoned Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address of 1865.
Managing Director of the McCourtney Institute of Democracy, Associate Research Professor, Political Science, Co-host of Democracy Works Podcast, Penn State
Global Scholar at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC and Hopkins P Breazeale Professor, Manship School of Mass Communications, Louisiana State University