In a revelatory trilogy, Professor Davis, called “one of the most influential historians of his generation,” placed slavery at the center of American history.

Meet eight abolitionists who helped fugitive slaves escape to freedom.

Was the Civil War fought over slavery? Shortly after seven southern states had seceded from the Union and joined together as the Confederate States of America, and less than a month before the Confederate military opened fire on Ft. Sumter, the newly elected vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, gave a definitive answer. Yes.

The year the first enslaved Africans were brought to Jamestown is drilled into students’ memories, but overemphasizing this date distorts history

Despite generations of imperial murder, torture, rape, and plunder, the British ruling class still gets the brown-nose treatment in historical depictions. Not so in The Favourite, where the royals are shown as the disgusting creatures they were and still are. By Eileen Jones.

Think of the worst thing you can possibly imagine that one human being might do to another and know that what really took place was a hundred times worse… By Matt Haughey.

Uncivil History

Benjamin Lay is not to be overlooked. By Natasha Frost. (Sept. 11, 2017)

On the new triangle trade, and the surprising connection between modern slavery and ecological disaster.

When Shelton Laurel and the Appalachian war are mentioned at all, they are too often perceived as an exception, wiped off with a “war's hell” or blamed on the ways of those peculiar mountain folks. By David Forbes.

Slavery still exists and it happens in plain sight.

The world of invention is famous for its patent disputes. But what happens when your dispute wasn’t with another inventor but whether the Patent Office saw you as a person at all? In 1864, a black man named Benjamin T. Montgomery tried to patent his new propeller for steamboats. The Patent Office said that he wasn’t allowed to patent his invention. All because he was enslaved.

The Department of Justice says prison labor is good for a company’s bottom line. By Alexia Fernández Campbell.

I may be locked up in solitary confinement, but I stand with the men and women rejecting modern slavery in America

By “dangling the carrot” to improve worker productivity, businesses are taking a page from slavery’s playbook. By Caitlin C. Rosenthal.

Yeonmi Park calls herself a former slave from North Korea. She had never seen a world map. She nearly starved. After she underwent appendix surgery without anesthesia at age 13, Ms. Park recalled, she saw human bodies piled outside the hospital, their eyes eaten by rats.

When the U.S. Civil War ended, Edward A. Pollard “of Virginia” immediately wrote a history of Confederate military operations—The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates—where he insisted that human slavery was immune from moral blame for the just concluded conflict...

The punkahs of the Antebellum era served many purposes.

Varlam Shalamov claimed not to have learned anything from the Gulag except how to wheel a loaded barrow. But one of his fragmentary writings, dated 1961, tells us more.

It’s widely known both that Pope Francis is an avid soccer fan, and that when it comes to social concerns, the fight against human trafficking is one of the priorities of his pontificate. Hence it’s no surprise that, with his green light, a papal foundation is getting involved in the fight against the use of modern-day slavery for building stadiums for soccer’s World Cup Qatar 2022, after NGOs found that hundreds of trafficking victims have already died building facilities that will host the tournament.