John S. Jacobs was a fugitive, an abolitionist — and the brother of the canonical author Harriet Jacobs. Now, his own fierce autobiography has re-emerged.
One of the recurring themes of the collection: the ways in which the scars caused by slavery and other forms of racial violence in America linger, influencing and echoing future events within a chronology of traumas.
Rachel Swarns’s recent book about a mass sale of enslaved people by Jesuit priests to save Georgetown University reminds us that the legacy of slavery is simultaneously the legacy of resistance
A new history of Indonesia’s fight for independence reveals the brutal means by which the Dutch tried to retain power.
Historian Robin Blackburn has completed a trilogy of books that provide a comprehensive Marxist account of slavery in the New World. He spoke to Jacobin about the intimate links between the slave systems in the Americas and the origins of capitalism.
What was the Civil War about? In a word, slavery. The driving force in American politics in the decades after the American Revolution was the rise of an arrogant, ruthless, parasitic oligarchy in the South, built on God-ordained economic inequality.
Edda L. Fields-Black sets out to restore the Combahee River Raid to its proper place in Tubman’s life and in the war on slavery.
"Pete" was one of many slaves considered property of the Jarrot family in Cahokia Heights. He sued for his freedom, and the lawsuit closed Illinois' slavery loophole. Pete's lawyer, Lyman Trumbull, went on to shape the 13th Amendment.
A new book investigates the lives of the hundreds of thousands of indigenous Americans who were brought to or traveled to Europe in the sixteenth century—a story central to the beginning of globalization.
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