Social Justice Environmentalism
Essay In a 2017 essay, National Museum of African American History and Culture director Lonnie Bunch noted that, like much of black history, environmental activism by people of color is...
Seeds of Rebellion in Plantation Fiction: Victor Séjour's "The Mulatto"
Introduction Cyrille Bissette (1795–1858). Print by François Le Villain originally published in Joseph Elzéar Morénas's Précis historique de la traite des noirs et de l'esclavage colonial, contenant l'origine de la traite, ses progrès,...
Unquiet Emmett Till
Review Emmett Till continues to torment our imaginations. How could two (and almost certainly more) grown men, veterans, over six feet tall, see a fourteen year old kid as such...
Reckoning with Enslavement
Excerpt Georgetown, April 2017 It was early morning when I crossed the Francis Scott Key Bridge from Virginia into Georgetown. College spires loomed in the distance, gray in the dawn...
Haiti and the Fear of Insurrection: A Review of The Slaveholding Crisis
Review Warning the governor of Kentucky that the white South stood on the brink of destruction in 1860, secession commissioner Stephen F. Hale wrote that Lincoln's election "inaugurates all the...
A Woman's Work: Jim Crow Modernity and the Remaking of the Carceral State
Review There's a gripping scene in Arthur Jafa's award-winning film, Dreams Are Colder Than Death, in which he pairs the image of a small group of African American boys acrobatically...
Toxic Knowledge: A Review of Baptized in PCBs
Review In 2001, lifelong Anniston, Alabama, resident Ruth Mims was called to testify in a lawsuit against the multinational corporation Monsanto. Monsanto had owned and operated a chemical manufacturing facility...
Buffalo Mountain Windfarm, Anderson County, Tennessee, 2005
Janet Powell, Buffalo Mountain Windfarm, Anderson County, Tennessee, 2005. Located north of Oak Ridge and about thirty miles northwest of Knoxville, Buffalo Mountain Windfarm was built in the 2000s as...
The Web of Cis-Atlantic History: A Review of Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World
Review In this impressive volume edited by Cécile Vidal a collection of historians seek to recover a "marginalized" past (16) within American history. Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World...
Putting the Hospital into Southern Hospitality
Review Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry, Cambridge University Press, 2011. In a few days, well before the first mosquito-killing frost reaches the South Carolina Lowcountry, I’ll head...