When Carla L. Peterson proposed a trip to the archives of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the hope of finding a record of her ancestors, her historian friends were skeptical. In fact, it was only by a lucky chance that Peterson discovered a scrapbook page onto
If you missed the debut of MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry Show this weekend, the network makes most of the episode available online. In her inaugural episode, Harris-Perry covers Mitt Romney and campaign psychology for candidates—including “Daddy Issues”, the GOP progress with Southern voters, union memberships and the middle class, women on
Ralph Ellison has often been cited by literary scholars as one of the 20th century’s most tragic examples of writer’s block: after the immense success of 1952’s Invisible Man, the author lived for more than 40 years without ever publishing a second novel. Yet, in Ralph Ellison In Progress: From
While we typically associate slavery in America with the plantation economies of cotton, sugar, and tobacco, by the middle of the 19th century, Southern railroad companies were actually some of the region’s largest slaveholders. Indeed, men like Samuel Ballton, a slave born in Virginia in 1838, spent years of their
Sarah Underwood— “Integration was one of the worst things to happen to black kids. We lost our community,” said a former student whose segregated Floridian high school closed in 1969. It’s nearly impossible to read that without feeling troubled. Weren’t black communities oppressed during Jim Crow? How could anyone feel
Although Pearl Primus was born in Trinidad and grew up in New York City, she identified strongly with her African heritage from a young age. When, in 1948, she was awarded a fellowship to pay for a trip, she wrote, “My soul hopped out of my body, swung on the
Born in 1886, John Graham was a progressive promoter of surrealism, cubism, and abstraction, as well as a mentor and confidant to the likes of Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning (the four artists collectively called themselves the Four Musketeers in the ‘30s). Last week, an exhibition entitled
Was Maximilien Robespierre (1758-94) a heroic martyr of the French Revolution, or a ruthless tyrant? In his new biography Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life, Peter McPhee combines new research and a deep understanding of the French Revolution to provide a fresh and nuanced portrait of one of history’s most controversial figures. Here the author discusses Robespierre, and explains the
Peculiarly, the story of Bill Traylor is both intensely local and transnational. Born into slavery in 1854, Traylor spent most of his life in the nearly unknown town of Benton, Alabama, just outside of Montgomery. As a self-taught artist, he moved to the state capital in 1935 when he was
2007 marked the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain, an anniversary celebrated with government programs as a great turning point in the history of the nation. Yet across the Atlantic, in the Jamaican parish of St. Elizabeth, a bicentennial of an entirely different kind was commemorated: