Departments

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emancipation

  • 1/15/2023

    Teach the History Behind "Emancipation" with the Primary Sources

    by Alan J. Singer

    Antoine Fuqua and Will Smith's "Emancipation" has rediscovered the life of an enslaved man variously called Peter or Gordon, who had been made famous through an 1863 photograph. Here's how history teachers can use the primary records of his life to accompany the film. 

  • SOURCE: New York Review of Books
    12/16/2022

    Was Emancipation Intended to Perpetuate Slavery by Other Means?

    by Sean Wilentz

    Protests movements have latched on to a misguided interpretation of the Thirteenth Amendment that argues it allowed and even encouraged the system of mass incarceration as an extension of slavery. A new global history extends that critique to the age of emancipation in general.

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    10/27/2022

    The Freedman's Bank Forum Obscures the Institution's Real History

    by Justene Hill Edwards

    Vice President Kamala Harris's recent remarks at the forum enlisted the Freedman's Bank to celebrate public-private partnerships between banks and minority communities. The real history of the Freedman's Bank shows why public-private partnerships and moral uplift are inadequate to promote financial equity. 

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    10/17/2022

    Revisiting Saidiya Hartman on the Meaning of Freedom

    by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

    A quarter century after publication, "Scenes of Subjection" still shows how Americans have embraced emancipation as a national expurgation of the sin of slavery, without stopping to consider the substantive meaning of freedom. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    6/13/2022

    Can Law be an Instrument of Black Liberation?

    by Paul Gowder

    As activists debate whether the law and courts are a dead end for the pursuit of justice, it's useful to recall Frederick Douglass's conception of the law as a basis for collective demands. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    11/18/2021

    Are We Witnessing a General Strike Today?

    by Nelson Lichtenstein

    DuBois's insight that enslaved people abandoning plantations during the Civil War was a form of general strike helps us understand the seemingly unorganized trend of workers quitting their jobs today as a meaningful labor action that points in the direction of economic freedom.

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    8/4/2021

    Overturning Five Myths of the Haitian Revolution

    by Julia Gaffield

    Many understandings of the Haitian Revolution, from its intellectual and political roots, to its military progress, to its political consequences, are at best half-truths. And it did not entail "white genocide." 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    6/18/2021

    The Truth About Black Freedom

    by Daina Ramey Berry

    Observing Juneteenth shouldn't be limited to commemorating a grant of freedom by the government; the deeper history of emancipation is of Black Americans demanding and pursuing freedom for themselves. 

  • SOURCE: Black Perspectives
    2/11/2021

    Biographies of Women and Emancipation in the Americas

    by Vanessa M. Holden

    Historian Vanessa Holden reviews a new book edited by Erica L. Ball, Tatiana Seijas and Terri L. Snyder which draws on the stories of women of African descent in the Americas to argue that such women helped bring freedom into being and defined what freedom in the world actually means.