Category: Slavery

  • In the antebellum South, plantation physicians used a new medical device—the spirometer—to show that lung volume and therefore vital capacity were supposedly less in black slaves than in white citizens. At the end of the Civil War, a large study of racial difference employing the spirometer appeared to confirm the finding, which was then applied…

  • The Young White Faces of Slavery The New York Times 2014-01-30 Mary Niall Mitchell, Joseph Tregle Professor of Early American History University of New Orleans For Northern readers scanning the Jan. 30, 1864, issue of Harper’s Weekly for news from the South, a large engraving on page 69 brought the war home in an unexpected…

  • Cousins, Across the Color Line The New York Times 2014-01-22 Tess Taylor EL CERRITO, Calif. — I learned about her through the comments section of an article in Publisher’s Weekly. I had recently published a book of poems crafted out of family stories, and it had been written up, along with a brief interview. In…

  • The story behind Dido Belle – the bi-racial Londoner who helped end slavery in Britain London Evening Standard 2014-01-08 Susannah Butter Susannah Butter tells the tale of Dido Belle, ahead of the release of a film about her extraordinary life starring Tom Felton and Miranda Richardson. Among the many aristocratic faces gazing out of frames…

  • Freedom’s Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner University of West Virginia Press March 2013 288 pages Hardcover (Jacketed) ISBN: 978-1-935978-60-2 Paperback ISBN: 978-1-935978-61-9 ePub ISBN: 978-1-935978-62-6 PDF ISBN: 978-1-935978-95-4 Foreword by: Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Fred C. Frey Professor of Southern Studies Louisiana State University Edited by: Jean Lee Cole, Associate Professor of English…

  • Uncovering records that link the slaveholder and enslaved Examiner.com 2013-12-02 Robin Foster In “Untangling the slaveholder and enslaved relationships,” several questions were raised about a possible link between Anderson Chick and Pettus Chick after it was discovered that Anderson and his mother, Eliza, lived next door to the Chick family for decades. If you are…

  • The genes that build America The Guardian 2007-07-14 Paul Harris, US Correspondent From the discovery that presidential hopeful Barack Obama is descended from white slave owners to the realisation that the majority of black Americans have European ancestors, a boom in ‘recreational genetics’ is forcing America to redefine its roots. Paul Harris pieces together the…

  • African Slavery: The New Hollywood Renaissance Our Weekly: Los Angeles 2013-11-14 William Covington, Contributor With the recent release of “12 Years A Slave” and “Django Unchained” and numerous slave genre movies awaiting release, it appears the slavery motif is possibly generating a new African American Renaissance in Hollywood. According to Pasadena screenwriter Herman James, “Hollywood…

  • A little over a year ago I received an email with the subject line “Ok I wonder why you call yourself ‘black’ and ‘African’” from a self-described longtime New African reader. Even if subsequent emails have been less direct in their articulation of the same underlying sentiment, they all point in a similar direction: some…

  • Goree: of Slavery, Signares and Foreigners with Cash dofo kow/ߘߝߏ ߞߏ ߎ/history matters 2013-01-16 Jody Benjamin Two of the hottest Hollywood films out right now deal with American slavery, “Lincoln” and “Django Unchained.” The history of slavery in the United State is once again in mainstream cultural vogue, this time with A-list directors Stephen Spielberg…