History, Natural History & the Arts
In this episode of The Historians Podcast Purdue University Professor Emeritus Robert May weighs in on whether enslaved people were better treated during the Christmas season in the Old South.
May is author of Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas and Southern Memory (2019). He earned his undergraduate degree at Union College in Schenectady. [Read more…] about Slavery, Christmas and Southern Memory
A press release from the New York City Parks Department announced “In honor of the 51st anniversary of Black Solidarity Day … 10 park spaces” would be named in “honor of the Black experience in New York City.” This was intended to fulfill a pledge made by the Parks Department “to demonstrate how it stands in solidarity with the Black Community in its fight to combat systemic racism.”
The newly named park spaces recognize national figures like Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Elston Howard, and Ella Fitzgerald who all had New York ties and were local community leaders. Baldwin gets a lawn in Harlem. Langston Hughes gets a playground. Elston Howard, a baseball MVP for the Yankees, gets a baseball field near Yankee Stadium. Ella Fitzgerald gets a playground in Queens. [Read more…] about NYC Park ‘Spaces’ Recognize African American Contributions, But
The name “Great Dismal Swamp” doesn’t evoke an image of a pleasant or beautiful place, and yet, it was an important place that offered land speculators the chance to profit and enslaved men and women a chance for freedom in colonial British America and the early United States.
Book purchases made through this link support New York Almanack’s mission to report new publications relevant to New York State.
Stanley A. Ransom, Jr.’s new book America’s First Black Poet; Jupiter Hammon of Long Island (Outskirts Press, Inc., 2020) is a collection of poems and writings of Jupiter Hammon, who spent most of his life as a slave in Lloyd Neck, Long Island. [Read more…] about New Book On Early Black Poet Jupiter Hammon of Long Island
A new study by Jessie Serfilippi, a historical interpreter at the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site in Albany, New York, details Alexander Hamilton’s “Hidden History as an Enslaver.”
Philip Schuyler was the father of Eliza Hamilton, Hamilton’s wife, and one of the largest slaveholders in New York State when the new nation was founded. [Read more…] about Reconsidering the Legacy of Alexander Hamilton
Book purchases made through this link support New York Almanack’s mission to report new publications relevant to New York State.
Between 1760 and 1761, Great Britain witnessed one of the largest slave insurrections in the history of its empire. Although the revolt took place on the island of Jamaica, the reverberations of this revolt stretched across the Atlantic Ocean and into the British North American colonies.
In this episode of the Ben Franklin’s World podcast, Vincent Brown, author of Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Belknap Press, 2020), joins us to investigate Tacky’s Revolt and how that revolt served as an eddy within the larger current of Atlantic warfare.
[Read more…] about Tacky’s Revolt: Slave Insurgency in Jamaica
Book purchases made through this link support New York Almanack‘s mission to report new publications relevant to New York State.
We live in an age where big businesses track our shopping habits and in some cases our work habits. But is the age of data new? When did the “age of the spreadsheet” and quantification of habits develop?
In this episode of Ben Franklin’s World: A Podcast About Early American History, Caitlin Rosenthal, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Harvard University Press, 2019), leads us on an investigation into the origins of how American businesses came to collect and use data to manage their workers and their pursuit of profits.
[Read more…] about Masters and Management: The Business of Slavery
The 2020 Peterboro Emancipation Day planned for August 1st, 2020 has been rescheduled for Saturday, August 7th, 2021 at the Gerrit Smith Estate National Historic Landmark.
The event will begin at 10 at The Barn on the Gerrit Smith Estate. After the morning assembly, songs, announcements, and the annual group photo, a processional to the Peterboro Cemetery will carry wreaths to lay on the grave of a person who was born enslaved, and died free. [Read more…] about Peterboro Emancipation Day Events Postponed to 2021
I offer the following tribute to Anna Douglass, first wife of Frederick Douglass and mother of their five children, on the anniversary of her death Aug. 4, 1882:
Both Frederick Bailey and Anna Murray were born in rural Maryland in the early 1800s and grew up under harsh racist customs that strictly defined roles for men and women by sex, race and class.
By the time Frederick and Anna met in the 1830s in Baltimore, his owner valued him as a slave who was a skilled caulker. Yet Anna, despite being a free woman skilled as a domestic and cook, was not well paid by her white employers. [Read more…] about Anna Murray-Douglass: Frederick’s Most Important Ally
The Underground Railroad Coalition recently announced a major effort to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the New York State constitutional provision that ended slavery in the State on July 4, 1827.
The emancipation provision in the New York State Constitution of 1799 provided for the gradual elimination of slavery in New York, but it did not end the widespread legal race discrimination in the state. The most glaring example of this was the New York State Constitution of 1821, which eliminated property qualifications to vote for white men, but denied black men owning less than $250 worth of property the right to vote. [Read more…] about Real Estate, Philip Payton And The Rise of Black Harlem