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...
Three Black Towns: An Excerpt from Black Landscapes Matter
Excerpt After the end of the Civil War, recently freed Black people endeavored to create their own communities. During Reconstruction, and with newfound access to political and economic power, Black...
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...
Backcountry Legends of a Minister's Death
Introduction The True Image explores the history and output of Scotch-Irish stonecutters in the early backcountry of Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. For none of them do we have any personal...
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...
Public Health in the US and Global South
...taken up hookworm and pellagra as challenges. Funding for health reform began to increase after World War I. New Deal spending doubled the number of county health departments, from 396 in...
Shades of Violence: Jim Crow Justice and Black Resistance in the Depression-Era South
...Alabama has provided the setting for a number of influential studies on race, labor, and radicalism in the Jim Crow South. Yet in shifting attention from Scottsboro's sleepy courthouse square...
Unhappy Trails in the Big Easy: Public Spaces and a Square Called Congo
...razed and an untold number of residents displaced in the name of progress. Nor is its future unclouded. Evening on Bayou St. John, New Orleans, between 1900 and 1906. Library...