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emancipation



  • Texas Politicians Want to Erase What Happened Between Juneteenth and Jim Crow

    by Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Zachary Montz

    Joshua Houston, long enslaved by Sam Houston, recognized that the collective work of securing freedom only began with the announcement of emancipation, and that teaching the state's history honestly was part of the struggle for an egalitarian society against people determined to stand against it. 



  • Teaching Hard Histories Through Juneteenth

    A celebration of freedom should put the work of the people who fought and struggled to achieve it at the center; thinking of freedom as something achieved instead of something granted. 



  • Gullah Geechee of Sea Islands Fight for their Post-Slavery Legacy

    by DeNeen L Brown

    The Gullah Geechee people were chosen for enslavement in the Sea Islands because of their experience cultivating rice in Africa, and maintained a distinctive culture with strong African elements through slavery and emancipation. Development and gentrification threaten that legacy today. 


  • Teach the History Behind "Emancipation" with the Primary Sources

    by Alan J. Singer

    Antoine Fuqua and Will Smith's "Emancipation" has rediscovered the life of an enslaved man variously called Peter or Gordon, who had been made famous through an 1863 photograph. Here's how history teachers can use the primary records of his life to accompany the film. 



  • Was Emancipation Intended to Perpetuate Slavery by Other Means?

    by Sean Wilentz

    Protests movements have latched on to a misguided interpretation of the Thirteenth Amendment that argues it allowed and even encouraged the system of mass incarceration as an extension of slavery. A new global history extends that critique to the age of emancipation in general.



  • The Freedman's Bank Forum Obscures the Institution's Real History

    by Justene Hill Edwards

    Vice President Kamala Harris's recent remarks at the forum enlisted the Freedman's Bank to celebrate public-private partnerships between banks and minority communities. The real history of the Freedman's Bank shows why public-private partnerships and moral uplift are inadequate to promote financial equity. 



  • Revisiting Saidiya Hartman on the Meaning of Freedom

    by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

    A quarter century after publication, "Scenes of Subjection" still shows how Americans have embraced emancipation as a national expurgation of the sin of slavery, without stopping to consider the substantive meaning of freedom. 



  • Can Law be an Instrument of Black Liberation?

    by Paul Gowder

    As activists debate whether the law and courts are a dead end for the pursuit of justice, it's useful to recall Frederick Douglass's conception of the law as a basis for collective demands. 



  • Are We Witnessing a General Strike Today?

    by Nelson Lichtenstein

    DuBois's insight that enslaved people abandoning plantations during the Civil War was a form of general strike helps us understand the seemingly unorganized trend of workers quitting their jobs today as a meaningful labor action that points in the direction of economic freedom.



  • Overturning Five Myths of the Haitian Revolution

    by Julia Gaffield

    Many understandings of the Haitian Revolution, from its intellectual and political roots, to its military progress, to its political consequences, are at best half-truths. And it did not entail "white genocide." 



  • The Truth About Black Freedom

    by Daina Ramey Berry

    Observing Juneteenth shouldn't be limited to commemorating a grant of freedom by the government; the deeper history of emancipation is of Black Americans demanding and pursuing freedom for themselves. 



  • Biographies of Women and Emancipation in the Americas

    by Vanessa M. Holden

    Historian Vanessa Holden reviews a new book edited by Erica L. Ball, Tatiana Seijas and Terri L. Snyder which draws on the stories of women of African descent in the Americas to argue that such women helped bring freedom into being and defined what freedom in the world actually means.