With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Diane Mutti Burke: The Far-Reaching Tentacles of American Slavery

[Diane Mutti Burke is an associate professor of history at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and the author of “On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865.”]

In March 2008, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama urged Americans to begin a long overdue conversation about race.

Difficult as it is, this conversation must begin with slavery. Most Americans think they understand the institution, although few have studied slavery in all its complexity. The tentacles of slavery reached far into American public life, yet the practice also involved intensely personal, even intimate, relations.

As is often the case, it is the local context that matters most. As Missourians and Kansans attempt to define our identities — and perhaps, in some cases, to assuage our guilt over the past — we often minimize the effect of slavery and segregation in our collective memories.

Missourians long have suggested that theirs was a more benign form of slavery, just as Kansans have held up the free state ideology as proof of their virtue. The truth lies somewhere in between....
Read entire article at Kansas City Star