"An illustrated edition of The 1619 Project, with newly commissioned artwork and archival images, The New York Times Magazine's award-winning reframing of the American founding and its contemporary echoes, placing slavery and resistance at the center of the American story. Here, in these pages, Black art provides refuge. The marriage of beautiful, haunting and profound words and imagery creates an experience for the reader, a wanting to reflect, to sit in both the discomfort and the joy, to contemplate what a nation owes a people who have contributed so much and yet received so little, and maybe even, to act. --Nikole Hannah-Jones, from the Preface. Curated by the editors of The New York Times Magazine, led by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, this illustrated edition of The 1619 Project features seven chapters from the original book that lend themselves to beautiful, engaging visuals, deepening the experience of the content. The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience offers the same revolutionary idea as the original book, an argument for a new national origin story that begins in late August of 1619, when a cargo ship of enslaved people from Africa arrived on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia. Only by reckoning with this difficult history and understanding its powerful influence on our present can we prepare ourselves for a more just future. Filled with original art by thirteen Black artists like Carrie Mae Weems, Calida Rawles, Vitus Shell, Xaviera Simmons, on the themes of resistance and freedom, a brand-new photo essay about slave auction sites, vivid photos of Black Americans celebrating their own forms of patriotism, and a collection of archival images of Black families by Black photographers, this gorgeous volume offers readers a dynamic new way of experiencing the impact of The 1619 Project. Complete with many of the powerful essays and vignettes from the original edition, written by some of the most brilliant journalists, scholars, and thinkers of our time, The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience brings to life a fuller, more comprehensive understanding of American history and culture"--

A sobering account of a little-known crime against African Americans, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today. From the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II, under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these "debts," prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries, and farm plantations. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. Armies of "free" black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery.--From publisher description

"This work is a history of slavery, capitalism, and the law that not only reframes how we understand the commodification of enslaved people, but also makes a significant methodological and moral argument for how historians should seek to make sense of the lived experiences of enslaved people in the antebellum United States"--

"Slavery has not been eradicated. The second edition of Human Trafficking updates the legal, moral and political attempts to contain sex and labor trafficking. The authors bring unique perspectives to these topics. Professor Page, an African American woman all too familiar with the vestiges of slavery, has written and lectured internationally on trafficking. Professor Piatt, a Hispanic law professor and former law school dean, brings his international experience as an educator, author and advocate regarding immigration and human rights matters to bear. The book considers efforts at containment, including controversial topics such as whether prostitution should be legalized. It concludes with specific approaches to eliminate trafficking"--

"A surge in interest in black reparations is taking place in America on a scale not seen since the Reconstruction Era. The Black Reparations Project gathers an accomplished interdisciplinary team of scholars-members of the Reparations Planning Committee-who have considered the issues pertinent to making reparations happen. This book will be an essential resource in the national conversation going forward. The first section of The Black Reparations Project crystallizes the rationale for reparations, cataloguing centuries of racial repression, discrimination, violence, mass incarceration, and the massive black-white wealth gap. Drawing on the contributors' expertise in economics, history, law, public policy, public health, and education, the second section unfurls direct guidance for building and implementing a reparations program, including draft legislation that addresses how the program should be financed and how claimants can be identified and compensated. Rigorous and comprehensive, The Black Reparations Project will motivate, guide, and speed the final leg of the journey for justice"--

Juneteenth celebrates the day slavery ended in Texas, June 19, 1865. Historian Annette Gordon-Reed studies the early American republic and the legacy of slavery. Originally broadcast May 25, 2021.

Before the Civil War, colonization schemes and black laws threatened to deport former slaves born in the United States. Birthright Citizens recovers the story of how African American activists remade national belonging through battles in legislatures, conventions, and courthouses. They faced formidable opposition, most notoriously from the US Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott. Still, Martha S. Jones explains, no single case defined their status. Former slaves studied law, secured allies, and conducted themselves like citizens, establishing their status through local, everyday claims. All along they argued that birth guaranteed their rights. With fresh archival sources and an ambitious reframing of constitutional law-making before the Civil War, Jones shows how the Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalized the birthright principle, and black Americans' aspirations were realized. Birthright Citizens tells how African American activists radically transformed the terms of citizenship for all Americans.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America w

Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones says 250 years of slavery and 100 years of legalized segregation robbed Black Americans of the ability to accumulate wealth; cash payments would help repair the damage.

"Bridging women's history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South's slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave-owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave-owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America"--

"In Sweet Taste of Liberty, W. Caleb McDaniel focuses on the experience of a freed slave who was sold back into slavery, eventually freed again, and who then sued the man who had sold her back into bondage. Henrietta Wood was born into slavery, but in 1848, she was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed. In 1855, however, a wealthy Kentucky businessman named Zebulon Ward, who colluded with Wood's employer, abducted Wood and sold her back into bondage. In the years that followed before and during the Civil War, she gave birth to a son and was forced to march to Texas. She obtained her freedom a second time after the war and returned to Cincinnati, where she sued Ward for $20,000 in damages--now known as reparations. Astonishingly, after ten years of litigation, Henrietta Wood won her case. In 1878, a Federal jury awarded her $2,500 and the decision stuck on appeal. While nowhere close to the amount she had demanded, this may be the largest amount of money ever awarded by an American court in restitution for slavery. Wood went on to live until 1912"--

"A profound new rendering of the struggle by African Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counterrevolution that resubjugated them, as seen through the prism of the war of images and ideas that have left an enduring stain on the American mind. The story of the abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar one, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: If emancipation came in Lincoln's America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s America? In a history that moves from Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance, Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of our leading chroniclers of the African American experience, brings a lifetime of wisdom to bear as a scholar, filmmaker, and public intellectual to answer that question. Interwoven with this history, Stony the Road examines America's first postwar clash of images utilizing modern ma ss media to divide, overwhelm--and resist. Enforcing a stark color line and ensuring the rollback of the rights of formerly enslaved people, racist images were reproduced on an unprecedented scale thanks to advances in technology such as chromolithography, which enabled their widespread dissemination in advertisements, on postcards, and on an astonishing array of everyday objects. Yet, during the same period when the Supreme Court stamped 'separate but equal' as the law of the land, African Americans advanced the concept of the 'New Negro' to renew the fight for Reconstruction's promise. Against the steepest of odds, they waged war by other means: countering depictions of black people as ignorant, debased, and inhuman with images of a vanguard of educated and upstanding black women and men who were talented, cosmopolitan, and urbane. The story Gates tells begins with Union victory in the Civil War and the liberation of nearly four million enslaved people. But the terror unleashed by wh ite paramilitary groups in the former Confederacy, combined with deteriorating economic conditions and diminished Northern will, restored 'home rule' to the South. One of the most violent periods in our history followed the retreat from Reconstruction, with thousands of African Americans murdered or lynched and many more afflicted by the degrading impositions of Jim Crow segregation. An essential tour through one of America's fundamental historical tragedies, [this book] is also a story of heroic resistance, as figures from Frederick Douglass to W E.B. Du Bois created a counternarrative, and culture, inside the lion's mouth. Gates charts the noble struggle of black people to defeat racism and force the country to honor the 'new birth of freedom' that Lincoln pledged would be the legacy of the Civil War, and uncovers the roots of racism in our time. Understanding this bitter struggle is essential if America's deepest wounds are ever truly to heal."--

An exploration of the idea of selective and forced slave breeding in the U.S. based on the collective memory and folktales of the descendants of enslaved people

How did America recover after its years of civil war? How did freed men and women, former slaves, respond to their newly won freedom? David Roediger's radical new history redefines the idea of freedom after the jubilee, using fresh sources and texts to build on the leading historical accounts of Emancipation and Reconstruction. Reinstating ex-slaves' own "freedom dreams" in constructing these histories, Roediger creates a masterful account of the emancipation and its ramifications on a whole host of day-to-day concerns for Whites and Blacks alike, such as property relations, gender roles, and labor

""It is staggering that there is no date commemorating the end of slavery in the United States." -Annette Gordon-Reed. The essential, sweeping story of Juneteenth's integral importance to American history, as told by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Texas native. Interweaving American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed, the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas in the 1850s, recounts the origins of Juneteenth and explores the legacies of the holiday that remain with us. From the earliest presence of black people in Texas-in the 1500s, well before enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown-to the day in Galveston on June 19, 1865, when General Gordon Granger announced the end of slavery, Gordon-Reed's insightful and inspiring essays present the saga of a "frontier" peopled by Native Americans, Anglos, Tejanos, and Blacks that became a slaveholder's republic. Reworking the "Alamo" framework, Gordon-Reed shows that the slave-and race-based economy not only defined this fractious era of Texas independence, but precipitated the Mexican-American War and the resulting Civil War. A commemoration of Juneteenth and the fraught legacies of slavery that still persist, On Juneteenth is stark reminder that the fight for equality is ongoing"--

'How the Word is Passed' is Clint Smith's revealing, contemporary portrait of America as a slave owning nation. Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks - those that are honest about the past and those that are not - that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nations collective history, and ourselves.

Edward E. Baptist is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University. He earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania and is the author of Creating an Old South, which won the 2003 Rembert Patrick Best Book in Florida History Award from the Florida Historical Society, and the co-editor of New Studies in the History of American Slavery.

Americans think of the North American colonies’ War for Independence from Great Britain as a struggle for freedom by a people subjected to colonial domination. Without denying the colonies’ grievances, this paper argues that the principal victims of injustice in North America were not European Americans but Americans of color. The freedom to exterminate Indians and take their land was one of the main objectives of the colonists’ drive for independence. The British government for its own reasons sought to slow down the colonies’ westward expansion. With territorial expansion would come the spread of slavery. Such effects were intended and accomplished and had been reasonably predictable at the time. It follows that one must question whether the War for Independence was morally justifiable.

"In most accounts of the origins of money we are offered pleasant tales in which it arises to the mutual benefit of all parties as a result of barter. In this groundbreaking study David McNally reveals the true story of money's origins and development as one of violence and human bondage. Money's emergence and its transformation are shown to be intimately connected to the buying and selling of slaves and the waging of war. Blood and Money demonstrates the ways that money has "internalized" its violent origins, making clear that it has become a concentrated force of social power and domination. Where Adam Smith observed that monetary wealth represents "command over labor," this paradigm shifting book amends his view to define money as comprising the command over persons and their bodies"--

"In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo's past--memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War. Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo's unique vernacular, and written from Hurston's perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture."--Publisher's website.

"The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country's very origin. The 1619 Project tells this new origin story, placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country. Orchestrated by the editors of The New York Times Magazine, led by MacArthur "genius" and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, this collection of essays and historical vignettes includes some of the most outstanding journalists, thinkers, and scholars of American history and culture--including Linda Villarosa, Jamelle Bouie, Jeneen Interlandi, Matthew Desmond, Wesley Morris, and Bryan Stevenson. Together, their work shows how the tendrils of 1619--of slavery and resistance to slavery--reach into every part of our contemporary culture, from voting, housing and healthcare, to the way we sing and dance, the way we tell stories, and the way we worship. Interstitial works of flash fiction and poetry bring the history to life through the imaginative interpretations of some of our greatest writers. The 1619 Project ultimately sends a very strong message: We must have a clear vision of this history if we are to understand our present dilemmas. Only by reckoning with this difficult history and trying as hard as we can to understand its powerful influence on our present, can we prepare ourselves for a more just future"--

The recordings of former slaves in Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine states. Twenty-two interviewees discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, coercion of slaves, their families, and freedom. Several individuals sing songs, many of which were learned during the time of their enslavement. It is important to note that all of the interviewees spoke sixty or more years after the end of their enslavement, and it is their full lives that are reflected in these recordings. The individuals documented in this presentation have much to say about living as African Americans from the 1870s to the 1930s, and beyond.

The Slavery in America and the World database is particularly special because of the meticulous development and organization that went into its development, opening up opportunities for unique browse and search tools. Learn how to use these tools in this guide.

Guest post from Nicholas Mignanelli, University of Miami   The “culture wars,” such as they are, have come to The Bluebook. Of course, The Bluebook is a cultural produ…

"Beginning in 1876, the Court systematically dismantled both the equal protection guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment, at least for African-Americans, and what seemed to be the guarantee of the right to vote in the Fifteenth. And so, of the more than 500,000 African-Americans who had registered to vote across the South, the vast majority former slaves, by 1906, less than ten percent remained. Many of those were terrified to go the polls, lest they be beaten, murdered, or have their homes burned to the ground. None of this was done in the shadows-those determined to wrest the vote from black Americans could not have been more boastful in either intent or execution. But the Court chose to ignore the obvious and wrote decisions at odds with the Constitution, preferring to instead reinforce the racial stereotypes of the day. "Whites Only" tells the story of an American tragedy, the only occasion in United States history in which a group of citizens who had been granted the right to vote then had it stripped away. Even more unjust was that this theft of voting rights was done with full approval, even the sponsorship, of the United States Supreme Court"--

There's a newish acronym, BIPOC, that encompasses the victims of US colonization and slavery. But should they be lumped together? And who does that label leave out?

The decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, that all African Americans (free and enslaved) were unable to become American citizens and therefore lacked standing to sue in federal court, and that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in the territories, was truly monumental in its impact on the nation and immediately generated widespread public debate. When congressional inaction postponed for a year the market availability of copies of the decision, it was Benjamin Howard's New York, Appleton imprint of the case that the public read and which scholars relied upon as a basis for the earliest and most forceful legal commentary and analysis. From a transmission history and a cultural reception perspective, the importance of this cannot be understated. Howard's imprint provided the textual ammunition for both sides of a debate which further divided the nation as it marched toward civil war. There currently exists no other single source of Howard's reproduction of the Dred Scott opinion with the published contemporary commentary contained in this volume. Also, there is a dearth of detailed bibliographic analysis regarding the production and transmission of the decision itself. The introductory bibliographic essay, "The Publication and Transmission History of Dred Scott v. Sandford" addresses many previously unrecorded bibliographic aspects of the decision.--Publisher

"Rumors of Thomas Jefferson's sexual involvement with his slave Sally Hemings have circulated for two centuries. It remains, among all aspects of Jefferson's renowned life, perhaps the most hotly contested topic. With Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Annette Gordon-Reed promises to intensify this ongoing debate as she identifies glaring inconsistencies in many noted scholars' evaluations of the existing evidence. She has assembled a fascinating and convincing argument: not that the alleged thirty-eight-year liaison necessarily took place but rather that the evidence for its taking place has been denied a fair hearing."--BOOK JACKET. "Possessing both a layperson's unfettered curiosity and a lawyer's logical mind, Annette Gordon-Reed writes with a style and compassion that are irresistible. Her analysis is accessible, with each chapter revolving around a key figure in the Hemings drama. The resulting portraits are engrossing and very personal. Gordon-Reed also brings a keen intuitive sense of the psychological complexities of human relationships - relationships that, in the real world, often develop regardless of status or race. The most compelling element of all, however, is her extensive and careful research, which often allows the evidence to speak for itself."--Jacket.

Thomas Jefferson is often portrayed as a hopelessly enigmatic figure -- a riddle -- a man so riven with contradictions that he is almost impossible to know. Lauded as the most articulate voice of American freedom and equality, even as he held people -- including his own family -- in bondage, Jefferson is variably described as a hypocrite, an atheist, or a simple-minded proponent of limited government who expected all Americans to be farmers forever. Now, Annette Gordon-Reed teams up with America's leading Jefferson scholar, Peter S. Onuf, to present a character study that dispels the many cliche��s that have accrued over the years about our third president. Challenging the widely prevalent belief that Jefferson remains so opaque as to be unknowable, the authors create a portrait of Jefferson, as he might have painted himself, one "comprised of equal parts sun and shadow." Tracing Jefferson's philosophical development from youth to old age, the authors explore what they call the "empire" of Jefferson's imagination -- an expansive state of mind born of his origins in a slave society, his intellectual influences, and the vaulting ambition that propelled him into public life as a modern avatar of the Enlightenment who, at the same time, likened himself to a figure of old -- "the most blessed of the patriarchs." Indeed, Jefferson saw himself as a "patriarch," not just to his country and mountain-like home at Monticello but also to his family, the white half that he loved so publicly, as well as to the black side that he claimed to love, a contradiction of extraordinary historical magnitude.

"President Joe Biden signed a bill establishing Juneteenth the date marking the end of slavery in the United States as a federal holiday."