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"12 Years a Slave"
What’s the worst a lame-duck presidency can do?
James Buchanan set us up for a Civil War. And as Heather Cox Richardson reminds us in this Slate interview conducted by Rebecca Onion, Benjamin Harrison saddled Grover Cleveland with an economic disaster often described as the “Panic of 1893.”...
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Episode 58: The Reverse Underground Railroad
Americans are undoubtedly familiar with the harrowing journey made by freedom seekers escaping enslavement that we have termed the “Underground Railroad.” Sadly, historians are only now becoming equally aware of a “Reverse Underground Railroad,” in which free black people from...
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SlaveryStories
Solomon Northup engraving, c1853 Amy Cavender of ProfHacker reports on a brand new digital project called “SlaveryStories. She bills it as “an online home for stories about slavery, told from the perspective of the slaves themselves.” Here is more: The...
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Yolanda Pierce on Slavery, Religious Rhetoric, and “12 Years a Slave”
The commentary on the movie 12 Years a Slave continues. The latest comes from The Christian Century website. Yolanda Piece of Princeton Theological Seminary discusses the role of religion in the film and the use of Christian rhetoric to support slavery in...
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Can a Feature Film Be a Work of History?: The Pietist Schoolman on “12 Years a Slave”
I am sure that this will not be our last post on 12 Years a Slave. The movie is getting positive reviews, both from film critics and the historical community. Over at the Pietist Schoolman, Chris Gehrz suggests that 12 Years a...
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Annette Gordon-Reed on “12 Years a Slave”
12 Years a Slave, the fictional adaptation of Solomon Northrup’s 1853 autobiography by the same name, has been getting a lot of attention of late. Northrup was a free black man who was kidnapped in Washington D.C. in 1841 and sold into slavery....
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