33 items
Frederick Douglass was one of the first fugitive slaves to speak out publicly against slavery. On the morning of August 12, 1841, he stood up at an anti-slavery meeting on Nantucket Island. With great power and eloquence, he described...
Brenda Stevenson - "What Is Slavery?"
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Bruce A. Ragsdale - "Washington and the Plow: The Founding Farmer and the Question of Slavery"
Bruce A. Ragsdale has served as the director of the Federal Judicial History Office at the Federal Judicial Center. Order Washington and the Plow at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase...
R. Isabela Morales - "Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom"
R. Isabela Morales is a historian who currently serves as the editor of the Princeton & Slavery Project at Princeton University. Order Happy Dreams of Liberty at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission...
Clint Smith - "How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery across America"
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Daina Ramey Berry & Leslie Harris - "Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas"
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Tamika Nunley - "At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C."
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Ilyon Woo - "Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey From Slavery to Freedom"
Ilyon Woo is a writer whose work has appeared in the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal . Her research has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Antiquarian Society. Order Master Slave...
Marcus Nevius - "City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763–1856"
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David Waldstreicher - "The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys through American Slavery and Independence"
David Waldstreicher is a Distinguished Professor of History, American Studies, and Africana Studies at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. Order The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We...
Julie Winch - "Between Slavery and Freedom: Free People of Color in America From Settlement to the Civil War"
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Richard J. M. Blackett - "The Captive's Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery"
Richard J. M. Blackett is Andrew Jackson Professor of History, Emeritus, at Vanderbilt University. Order The Captive's Quest for Freedom at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through...
The Discovery of the Americas and the Transatlantic Slave Trade
In the middle of the fifteenth century, Europe, Africa, and the Americas came together, creating—among other things—a new economy. At the center of that economy was the plantation, an enterprise dedicated to the production of exotic...
The Civil War and Reconstruction in the American West
The histories of the Civil War and of the emerging West were tangled together from their beginnings. Although the war was fought mostly in the East, the events that set it off were born of the expansion of the 1840s, and in turn the...
The Social and Intellectual Legacy of the American Revolution
"We can see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used. We are now really another people, and cannot again go back to ignorance and prejudice. The mind once enlightened cannot...
Annette Gordon-Reed - "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family"
Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and a professor of history at Harvard. Order The Hemingses of Monticello at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the...
The Failure of Compromise
In the spring of 1861, the United States of America split into two hostile countries—the United States and the new Confederate States of America. The two opposing heads of state agreed about what was causing the rupture—the long...
The Road to War
‘A house divided against itself can not stand’ I believe this government can not endure permanently, half slave, and half free . . . I do not expect the Union to be dissolved - I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it...
Abraham Lincoln and the Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment
"Those who knew Mr. Lincoln best," wrote Illinois Congressman Isaac Arnold, "knew that he looked, confidently, to the ultimate extinction of slavery" and used "every means which his prudent and scrupulous mind recognized as right and...
An Introduction to Juneteenth
Juneteenth is the most widely recognized, long-lived Black commemoration of slavery’s demise. Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, when federal troops commanded by General George Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, to proclaim freedom to...
Lincoln
No one seemed less well-cast for the role of reformer, in an age of reform, than Abraham Lincoln. To begin with, he was a stranger, emotionally and intellectually, to evangelical Christianity, the great engine of reform in the...
African Americans and Emancipation
Historians increasingly understand emancipation was not a singular event that simply involved the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863. Instead, emancipation is better understood as...
Admiration and Ambivalence: Frederick Douglass and John Brown
John Brown did not make it easy for people to love him—until he died on the gallows. Frederick Douglass, from his first meeting with Brown in 1847, through a testy but important relationship in the late 1850s, had long viewed the...
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