slavery
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Got a Question? Ask a Slave
Azie Dungey started her acting career as “the time-traveling black girl”: she played “every black woman of note that ever lived” in regional theaters and at historic sites around Washington, DC. One of those roles—as a slave at George Washington’s…
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A Glimpse of Modern-Day Slavery
I am alive today because of that truck driver. He saved my life trafficking me, taking my money, selling me to another master. There is no help given for free. I was a transaction. Those are the words of a…
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The Rumpus Interview with Joe Mozingo
Journalist Joe Mozingo digs deep into his ancestral history to uncover the origin behind his surname, and discovers it’s one of the few African names to survive not only the Middle Passage, but the history of American slavery itself.
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Why the Civil War Is Still Worth Talking About
Byliner’s list of spectacular nonfiction articles of 2012 highlights two complementary essays from the Atlantic‘s Civil War issue. First, Yoni Appelbaum uses a hyperrealistic “cyclotron” painting of the Battle of Gettysburg as a pin to puncture the national narrative that the…
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The Reproductive Rights Stories You Haven’t Heard
As a historian, I amplify these echoes as reminders that the abortion movement was never monochromatically white. We can ill afford these silences at a time when women’s actions during pregnancy—whether choosing home birth, drug use, or merely delivering a…
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“To My Old Master”
Here’s a letter written in 1865 by an ex-enslaved man, Jourdan Anderson, in response to his former master’s request that Jourdan return to work on his farm. “I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five…
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Politics Sunday
Here’s lots of good info on the situation in Chile, and here’s some more. We’re all thinking of folks down there. Who wants a Sumatran tiger for a pet? “The inescapable truth is that “the world” never forgave Haiti for its revolution,…