Elliott Drago is Editorial Officer of the Jack Miller Center. This interview is based on his new book, Street Diplomacy: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom in Philadelphia, 1820-1850 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022). JF: What led you to write Street...
Peter Wirzbicki is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University. This interview is based on his new book, Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists Against Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). JF: What led you to write...
Over at The New Republic historian Eric Herschthal reviews: Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War; John Harris, The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the...
John Oldfield is Professor of Emancipation and Slavery at The University of Hull. This interview is based on his new book, The Ties that Bind: Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Reform, c. 1820-1866 (Liverpool University Press, 2020). JF: What...
Hannah-Rose Murray is Early Career Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She is also the creator of a virtual Black Abolitionist tour of London, highlighting six important sites where African American activists made an impact on the UK...
Remember a couple of weeks ago when court evangelical Eric Metaxas said Jesus was white? Me too. Here is Peter Manseau, the curator of religion at the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History: H. Ford Douglas — born into slavery, escaped...
Check out Julie Zauzmer’s nice piece on the Bible and slavery at The Washington Post. It draws from some of the best scholars on slavery, American religion, and the Bible, including Mark Noll and Yolanda Pierce. Here is a taste: As...
Learn more here....
Rutgers University historian Louis Masur argues that Abraham Lincoln took a document written by a Virginia slaveholder and used it to advance a free society. Here is a taste of his piece at The American Scholar: It took Lincoln to salvage...
Over at “Made by History,” a history blog at The Washington Post, University of Alabama history professor Joshua Rothman offers some historical context for the Trump administration’s attacks on the news media. Here is a taste: Accused of being purveyors of...
Over at Time, National Book Award winner and historian Ibram X. Kendi introduces us to Hinton Rowan Helper, the author of The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (1857). Kendi compares the influence of Helper’s book to Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Here...
I wrote a little bit about Romans 13 and the American Revolution in Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction. Over at The Anxious Bench, Chris Gehrz notes that this New Testament passage was also used frequently in...
It was passed in 1652 in Rhode Island colony. It applied to Warwick and Providence. It banned lifetime ownership of slavery. It was probably never enforced. Olivia Waxman explains it all at Time. Her piece centers around the work of Christy...
Stephen Kantrowitz is the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History, African American Studies, and American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In a recent essay at Boston Review he compares the racial plight of escaped slaves and free blacks in...
I am in Philadelphia today. This morning I was interviewed for a documentary film on women, religion, and anti-slavery in the early American Republic (1789-1848) titled “The Daring Women of Philadelphia.” The Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmakers at History Making Productions...
Here. For some context click here....
Michael Woods, a history professor at Marshall University and the author of Bleeding Kansas: Slavery, Sectionalism, and Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border, reminds us that Americans must “reaffirm our dedication to democracy as a process” in the midst of this current election...
Julie L. Holcomb is Assistant Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Museum Studies at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. This interview is based on her new book Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave...
Corey M. Brooks is Assistant Professor of History at York College of Pennsylvania. This interview is based on his new book, Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics (American Beginnings, 1500-1900) (University of Chicago Press, 2016)....
Adam Dean is Assistant Professor of history at Lynchburg College. This interview is based on his new book, An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era (University of North Carolina Press, December 2014). JF: What led you...
