Kendra Taira Field— When Thomas Jefferson Brown finally decided to make his home in Indian Territory in 1870, he had been there many times before. For months he had been going in on day trips from Arkansas, his grandson mused more than a century later, learning the Muskogean languages and
Anders Walker— Now that the lawsuit between Harper Lee’s estate and Broadway producer Scott Rudin is settled, the question remains whether the stage version of Atticus Finch is going to remain faithful to the beloved lawyer in To Kill a Mockingbird. According to Lee’s estate, Finch was a “model of
Joanne B. Freeman— On Saturday, July 18, 1795, an angry crowd stood gathered before Federal Hall in New York City, eager to protest the Jay Treaty, which eased ongoing tensions between Great Britain and the United States. Convinced that the treaty was too favorable to the British, leading Republicans had
Patrick Smith— What will come of the mid-June murders in Charleston is still to be determined. We have already seen an extraordinary display of solidarity and restraint as forms of power among South Carolina blacks close to the African Methodist Episcopal Church. And the news from Columbia, South Carolina’s capital,
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
It’s hard to imagine a history of women in American film and literature without remembering Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. First published in 1936, iconic female characters like Scarlett O’Hara and Melanie Hamilton Wilkes are fixed in our memory; the book itself was a Pulitzer-Prize winner and remains one
In September 1955, shortly after Emmett Till was murdered by white supremacists in Money, Mississippi, his grieving mother, Mamie Till Bradley, distributed to newspapers and magazines a gruesome black-and-white photograph of his mutilated corpse. Asked why she would do this, Mrs. Bradley explained that by witnessing, with their own eyes,
“[A] beautifully conceived and penetrating book…Clarke has produced one of the finest studies of American slavery ever written.” The glowing review, courtesy of Steven Hahn in the latest issue of The New Republic, is of Erskine Clarke’s new book, Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic, a narrative history of the intimately