The story of the driver is the story of Atlantic slavery. Starting in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, enslavers developed the driving system to solve their fundamental problem: how to extract labor...

Would there have been a Frederick Douglass if it were not for Betsy Bailey, the grandmother who raised him? Would Harriet Jacobs have written her renowned autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave...

In The Enslaved and Their Enslavers, Edward Pearson offers a sweeping history of slavery in South Carolina, from British settlement in 1670 to the dawn of the Civil War. For enslaved peoples, the shape...

In the years between the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, as legal and cultural understandings of citizenship became more racially restrictive, black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based...

Citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States was an ever-moving target. The Constitution did not specify its exact meaning, leaving lawmakers and other Americans to struggle over the fundamental...

Undoing Slavery excavates cultural, political, medical, and legal history to understand the abolitionist focus on the body on its own terms. Motivated by their conviction that the physical form of the...

Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of "40 acres and a mule"—the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All...