The basic objective of the new Locating Slavery’s Legacies database (LSLdb) is to collect information about monuments and memorials identified with the Civil War and Confederacy on the campuses of American colleges. This information will in analysis and understanding of the impact of pseudohistorical Lost Cause movements on higher education in the United States in the 160 years since emancipation and the end of the war. [Read more…] about Project Seeks to Document Confederacy & Civil War Memorials on College Campuses
Slavery
Freedom in New York: Chenango County, the Underground RR & US Colored Troops
During Black History Month 2023, I received an email from Jill Mirabito, a longtime resident of Norwich, Chenango County, NY, and Associate Vice President for University Advancement at SUNY Oneonta. The note pertained to the Chenango County Historical Society having honored Benjamin J. Tillett, an African American resident of Norwich during and after the Civil War. He had been a slave in Northeast North Carolina before arriving in Norwich.
In November 1863, Tillett enlisted in the 11th United States Colored Heavy Artillery (also known as the 14th Rhode Island Heavy Artillery). He returned to Norwich after the war and died there in 1902. Before his death, he had a membership with the E.B. Smith Post, GAR, A Knight Templar of Palestine Commandery, and attended religious services frequently at the local AME Zion Church. The admiration that Tillett received from his adopted residence caught my attention. I was intrigued. [Read more…] about Freedom in New York: Chenango County, the Underground RR & US Colored Troops
Sojourner Truth: How An Enslaved Dutch Speaker Became A Black Liberation Icon
On March 31st, 1817 the New York State Legislature decided that enslavement within its borders had to come to an end. Final emancipation would occur on July 4th, 1827. Coincidentally, the date of choice was almost exactly two centuries after the Dutch West India Company’s yacht Bruynvisch arrived at Manhattan on August 29th, 1627. [Read more…] about Sojourner Truth: How An Enslaved Dutch Speaker Became A Black Liberation Icon
Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795
Leaders of the founding of the United States who called for American liberty are scrutinized for enslaving Black people themselves: George Washington consistently refused to recognize the freedom of those who escaped his Mount Vernon plantation. And we have long needed a history of the founding that fully includes Black Americans in the Revolutionary protests, the war, and the debates over slavery and freedom that followed. [Read more…] about Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795
The Nature of Slavery: Environment & Plantation Labor
In the late 18th century, planters in the Caribbean and the American South insisted that only Black people could labor on plantations, arguing that Africans, unlike Europeans, had bodies particularly suited to cultivate crops in hot climates.
Katherine Johnston’s The Nature of Slavery (Oxford Univ. Press, 2022) disrupts this longstanding claim about biological racial difference. [Read more…] about The Nature of Slavery: Environment & Plantation Labor
The African Burial Ground, Columbia University & Manhattan’s Grave-Robbers
On July 26, 1788, the Convention of the State of New York, meeting in Poughkeepsie, ratified the Constitution of the United States and, in doing so, was admitted to the new union as the eleventh of the original thirteen colonies joining together as the United States of America.
For New Yorkers, it had been an eventful year. [Read more…] about The African Burial Ground, Columbia University & Manhattan’s Grave-Robbers
Madison’s Militia: The Hidden History of the Second Amendment
The new book Madison’s Militia: The Hidden History of the Second Amendment (Oxford Univ. Press, 2023) by Carl Bogus is an engaging history overturning the conventional wisdom about the Second Amendment – showing that the right to bear arms was not about protecting liberty but about preserving slavery. [Read more…] about Madison’s Militia: The Hidden History of the Second Amendment
The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journey
Admired by George Washington, ridiculed by Thomas Jefferson, published, and read far and wide, Phillis Wheatley led an extraordinary life. Seized in West Africa and forced into slavery as a child, she was sold to a merchant family in Boston, where she became a noted poet at a young age.
Mastering the Bible, Latin translations, and literary works, she celebrated political events, praised warriors, and used her verse to variously lampoon, question, and assert the injustice of her enslaved condition. [Read more…] about The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journey
A United Nations Exhibit Sheds Light On Dutch Colonial Slavery
The exhibit “Slavery: Ten True Stories of Dutch Colonial Slavery from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam” will be displayed in the lobby of the United Nations in New York City from February 27 through March 30, 2023.
The exhibition explores ten true personal stories centered on wooden foot stocks known as a “tronco” (Portuguese for tree trunk) that were used to constrain enslaved people by clamping their ankles. The foot stocks represent the more than one million people who forced to work in Dutch colonies on sugar plantations and in mines and harbors in Brazil, Suriname, the Caribbean, South Africa, and Asia. [Read more…] about A United Nations Exhibit Sheds Light On Dutch Colonial Slavery
Wealth and Slavery in New Netherland
In this episode of Ben Franklin’s World, Nicole Maskiell, an associate professor of History at the University of South Carolina and the author of Bound By Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of the Northern Gentry (Cornell Univ. Press, 2022) joins Liz Covart to investigate the practice of slavery in Dutch New Netherland and how the colony’s elite families built their wealth and power on the labor, skills, and bodies of enslaved Africans and African Americans. [Read more…] about Wealth and Slavery in New Netherland