What to the Slave Is the Fourth July? by Frederick Douglass speaks to the frustrations spurred by the gap between the ideals of the United States and the reality we witness every day, and the threat of fascism. Read/listen to his brilliant speech.
Even before Douglass arrived in Ireland in 1845, he was aware of the rich tradition of Irish men and women involved in the transatlantic movement to bring an end to the U.S. system of enslavement.
We face a second insurrection today, and most people have no idea how closely it’s modeled on the first one. The new GOP motto might as well be, “We don’t need no stinkin’ issues; we just want power and revenge for the heroes of the Old South.”
Some historians have described the South's convict leasing system as “worse than slavery,” because there was no incentive to avoid working those people to death.
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.
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