Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Abolition
The black naturalist, astronomer, surveyor, and almanac-writer Benjamin Banneker took issue with Thomas Jefferson’s attitude toward “those of my complexion.”
Peter Waddell's "A
Her novel helped to end slavery and proved that Lincoln was right when he said, “Whoever can change public opinion can change the government.”
In what many consider the greatest anti-slavery oration ever given, Frederick Douglass called for “the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”
At five critical junctures in American history, major political compromises have proved that little of lasting consequence can occur if the entrenched sides don't make serious concessions.
Compromise has become a bad word for many in the political sphere. Yet our history shows that it’s the way things get done and how the country moves forward.
Without the material support of a half-dozen prominent northerners known as the Secret Six, John Brown’s attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry 150 years ago may well have never occurred.
ON OCTOBER 17, 1909, a small group of former abolitionists quietly gathered in an imposing brick house in Concord, Massachusetts, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of John Brown’s historic raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, then a part of Virginia.
Tempers flare and violence reigns in the pre–Civil War battleground of Kansas.
On January 25, 1859, a small wagon expedition of three whites and 13 blacks stole away from Lawrence, Kansas, on the first leg of a journey that would take the African Americans to the free state of Iowa, far from Kansas and the ever-present threat of kidnapping by slave traders.
Two hundred years after his birth, Americans still revere him as a martyr and loathe him as a fanatical murderer. What was he?
Boston is so bright a beacon of Revolutionary history that it is easy to forget that the city played an equally significant role in another civil war. Dara Horn, a Harvard junior, seeks out the moral engine of the Union cause.
Time is a viscous fluid, and occasionally it sticks to places, leaving the residue of certain centuries attached to the edges of buildings, or to markers on the streets, or to the insides of tourists’ heads. In Boston that clinging moment is the colonial period and the American Revolution. When tourists think of Boston, they think of Puritans and patriots, of minutemen and Paul Revere.
Packed like animals in the holds of slave ships, Negroes bound for America were prey to disease, brutal masters, and their own suicidal melancholy.
Packed like animals in the holds of slave ships, Negroes bound for America were prey to disease, brutal masters, and their own suicidal melancholy.
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