Category: Slavery

  • Dido Belle: Britain’s first black aristocrat The Telegraph 2016-07-06 Nisha Lilia Diu Amma Asante’s award-winning film Belle arrives on Netflix today. In this feature, first published in June 2014, Nisha Lilia Diu reveals the true story that inspired it The amazing thing about Dido Elizabeth Belle is not that she was mixed-race. Who knows how…

  • FOR nearly 20 years, my great-great-great-grandfather’s portrait has watched over me from my red dining room wall. With his high collar, ruffled cravat and black waistcoat, Samuel Fales, 1775-1848, is the very image of the upstanding 19th-century New England gentleman.

  • Recently, there’s been numerous viral photos of white parents posting pictures of their mixed Black children with #AllLivesMatter political statements.

  • Commodification of the Black Body, Sexual Objectification and Social Hierarchies during Slavery The Earlham Historical Journal: An Undergraduate Journal of Historical Inquiry Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana Volume VII: Issue II (Spring 2015) pages 21-43 Iman Cooper The horror of the institution of slavery during the late eighteenth century was not that it displaced millions of…

  • Crucifying the White Savior (Film) Shadow and Act 2016-06-29 Andre Seewood We no longer have to forgive them, for they know exactly what they are doing. The new film by Gary Ross, “The Free State of Jones” is uncontestably a White savior film. Laid bare, “The Free State of Jones” is a simplistically constructed tale…

  • The Faux-Enlightened Free State of Jones The Atlantic 2016-06-28 Vann R. Newkirk II STX Productions Matthew McConaughey’s new movie is a predictable but instructive journey of white saviorhood. “Somehow, some way, and some time, everybody is somebody else’s nigger,” is an actual quote that happens around midway through Free State of Jones. Uttered by Matthew…

  • Black and White in the Free State of Jones Process: A Blog For American History 2016-07-14 Nina Silber, Professor of History Boston University I’ll confess: I was fully prepared to be disappointed with the recently-released Free State of Jones. Not out of any disrespect toward the excellent historical scholarship behind the film, including Victoria Bynum’s…

  • Making Jokes and History in An Octoroon African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) 2016-06-25 Christopher Bonner, Assistant Professor of History University of Maryland Last weekend I saw a performance of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins‘ play An Octoroon, which is a reimagining of Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon, a popular 1859 melodrama set on a Louisiana plantation. There is…

  • An interview with Victoria Bynum, historian and author of The Free State of Jones—Part 1 World Socialist Web Site 2016-07-12 David Walsh and Joanne Laurier Victoria Bynum Free State of Jones, the film directed by Gary Ross, powerfully and movingly recounts a significant episode of the American Civil War, the insurrection against the Confederacy led…

  • La Esclava Blanca: The New Telenovela Rewriting Colombia’s History of Slavery AAIHS: African American Intellectual History Society 2016-07-06 Yesenia Barragan Columbia University, New York, New York This is a guest post by Yesenia Barragan, a historian of race, slavery, and emancipation in Colombia, Afro-Latin America, and the Atlantic/Pacific worlds. She recently received her Ph.D. in…