Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Slavery
As he later recounted in his memoirs, Frederick Douglass endured daily beatings and forced labor before taking his chances on the road to freedom.
Born in 1818 a
Our first president spoke about abolishing slavery, but couldn’t manage without the unpaid labor of hundreds of people at Mount Vernon.
Editor's Note: David O.
Chief Justice Roger Taney made his contribution to the ideology of white supremacy when he asserted that blacks were a people apart, beyond the promise of the Declaration and the guarantees of the Constitution.
Editor's Note: H. W. Brands is a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
While the Underground Railroad helped enslaved black people escape north, another version ran in reverse, sending free men, women, and children back into bondage.
Excerpted from the George Washington Book Prize finalist Stolen: Five Free B
The famous photographs at Harvard, first published in American Heritage in 1977, are at the center of a difficult debate over who owns the images.
The Emancipation Proclamation opened the door for Pennsylvania's African-American soldiers.
The scene was wild and grand.
The highly lucrative cotton crop of 1860 emboldened the South to challenge the economic powerhouse of the North
In the mid- to late summer of 1860, billions of soft pink and white Gossypium hirsutum blooms broke out across South Carolina, Georgia, western Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, soon to morph into puffy white bolls.
South Carolina severed ties with the Union not out of concern for states' rights but because of slavery
At 7 p.m. on Thursday, December 20, 1860, some 170 men marched through the streets of Charleston, South Carolina, walking from St. Andrews Hall to a new meetinghouse amid the cheers of onlookers. Half of them were more than 50 years old, most well-known.
Having given slavery a new lease on life, he then made Northern triumph inevitable
Fistfights broke out in Congress in 1850 over whether the territories just won in the Mexican War should be slave or free—and only a last-minute series of compromises prevented catastrophe.
On a raw evening in winter of 1850, a weary-looking, feeble, and desperately ill old man arrived unannounced at the Washington, D.C. residence of Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky had come to seek Webster’s help in his battle to save the Union.
Over the question of whether Missouri should be admitted to the Union as a free or slave state in 1820, creative moderates brokered an ingenious compromise that averted civil war.
On February 13, 1819, the 35-year-old Congressman William Cobb unfolded his six-foot frame from his chair in the chamber of the Old Brick Capitol building in Washington, D.C., and locked his gray eyes on James Tallmadge Jr. of New York. There was little love lost between the grandson of Georgia’s most famous patriarch and the accomplished city lawyer. They had tangled on issues before, Cobb eloquently if savagely attacking Andrew Jackson over his campaign in Florida against the Seminoles; Tallmadge had defended the general with equal vigor.
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.
On March 6, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its decision in the case of Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford.
Slavery Televised
“Slavery was no sideshow in American history,” says Dr. James Oliver Horton about the PBS series Slavery and the Making of America, which aired as this issue went to press and is now available on DVD. “It was the main event.”
It was the nation’s biggest business, it was as well-organized as a Detroit assembly line, and it was here to stay. It was slavery. David Brion Davis, a lifelong student of the institution, tells how he discovered—and then set about teaching—its vast significance.
The assignment—to select 10 books suitable for a lay reader that cover American history between the Constitution and the 1850s—sounds easier than it is.
Cyrus McCormick takes on a major problem with agriculture.
A century and a half of the U.S. economy, from the railroad revolution to the information revolution
Cotton, Gold, and Flesh
Paying For Union
The Age of Steel
Should our leaders say they’re sorry about slavery? About Indians? About their personal behavior? Such questions are hardly new; public contrition has been a national preoccupation for centuries.
Before President Clinton went to Africa in March of this year, his press secretary, Mike McCurry, made a double announcement. The president would discuss American slavery while visiting the continent from which America’s slaves had come. But he would not apologize for it.
THE VISITORS WHO COME HERE FOR THE OLYMPICS this summer won’t find Tara. What they will find is a city facing an unusual and sometimes painful past with clarity of vision and generosity of spirit.
The saga of Liberia’s beginnings reflects both America’ humanitarian generosity and its racism.
I have a confession. Last year, when Americans were asked to help feed the survivors of civil war in Rwanda, I had to go to the atlas to find out where Rwanda was.
How a half-dozen pillars of the community became infatuated with the idea of shedding (someone else’s) blood
At Oberlin College one day in the autumn of 1961, I happened to find myself at the same lunch table with my classmate Rennie Davis. He was a quiet government major then, close-cropped, bespectacled, a former 4-H Club member, but already caught up in the romance of revolution.
BORN IN SLAVERY AND RAISED IN ITS PAINFUL AFTERMATH TO BECOME ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL AMERICAN ICONS, SHE HAS BEEN MADE TO ENCOMPASS LOVE AND GUILT AND RIDICULE AND WORSHIP, AND STILL SHE LIVES ON.
On Highway 61, just outside of Natchez, Mississippi, stands Mammy’s Cupboard, a 34-high concrete figure of a black woman.
The struggles and torments of a forgotten class in antebellum America: black slaveowners
In the 1640s, John Casor was brought from Africa to America, where he toiled as a servant for a Virginia landowner.
On the 25th anniversary of the most controversial historical novel in memory, the author of The Confessions of Nat Turner speaks of a novelist’s duty to history and fiction’s strange power not only to astonish, but to enrage.
Twenty-five years ago this November, I found myself in Ohio, where I was being awarded an honorary degree at Wilberforce University.
As any faithful reader of the old gossip columns knows, great wealth too easily acquired can be a very mixed blessing indeed.
Deep South states are taking the lead in promoting landmarks of a 300-year heritage of oppression and triumph, and they’re drawing visitors from around the world.
Kate is waiting for us by the kitchen garden. Her owner, Benjamin Powell, has warned us that she “often has a case of the grumps,” so we approach her cautiously.
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