All posts tagged: Slavery

Jefferson, Independence, and Slavery | Annette Gordon-Reed, Fintan O’Toole

Jefferson, Independence, and Slavery | Annette Gordon-Reed, Fintan O’Toole

In the first episode of Endgame with Fintan O’Toole, the Review’s newest podcast, O’Toole welcomes Annette Gordon-Reed, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning history The Hemingses of Monticello, for a conversation about Thomas Jefferson, the legacy of slavery in the United States, the original preamble to the Declaration of Independence, and the fate of the Voting Rights Act.  Click the “Subscribe” link in the player above to follow this podcast on your favorite listening platform. Annette Gordon-Reed has been a frequent contributor to The New York Review for the last ten years. Her Pulitzer-Prize winning The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family revised our understanding of Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, and her pieces in the Review have ranged from W.E.B. Du Bois to Hillary Clinton to the history of Texas. She is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard. Her latest book is Jefferson on Race: A Reader. New episodes from Endgame’s first season will appear every Tuesday, and will be available on all major podcast platforms. Visit here to subscribe. Source link

New Discoveries in the Archive of Slavery | Drew Gilpin Faust

New Discoveries in the Archive of Slavery | Drew Gilpin Faust

For nearly two decades now, historians have been debating whether it is even possible to write the history of American slavery. Can an accurate story of a system of oppression be derived from sources created and preserved by the oppressors? In many ways it is a surprising controversy. For the generation of American historians working after the emergence of the mainstream civil rights movement in the mid-1950s, slavery studies represented perhaps the most exciting field of American historical scholarship, attracting an audience of general readers as well as the attention of prominent academics. Books about slavery were discussed in popular magazines and featured on the nightly news. Innovative methodologies, including demography and quantitative analysis, folklore, material culture, oral history, and family reconstitution opened new windows into the past. At the same time, changed assumptions about racial equality made the “moonlight and magnolias” South of Gone with the Wind and most earlier studies of slavery obsolete. Historians began to construct a rich and sobering narrative of the lives of both enslavers and enslaved, as well as …

Exclusive: Why Jamaica Is Filing A Petition For Slavery Reparations With The King Now

Exclusive: Why Jamaica Is Filing A Petition For Slavery Reparations With The King Now

Olivia Grange, Minister for Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport of the Republic of Jamaica The government of Jamaica is filing a petition calling for slavery reparations to coincide with a particularly horrific chapter from the country’s past, a minister told HuffPost UK. Jamaica’s culture, gender, entertainment and sports minister Olivia Grange is in Britain to ask King Charles, as Jamaica’s head of state, to refer three specific questions to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. That includes whether the seizure of Africans, their forced transportation to Jamaica and their chattel enslavement was ever lawful under English law, whether it is a breach of international law, and if the UK has a legal obligation to offer a reparatory remedy. Grange said: “This is an unprecedented and historic moment in the global fight for reparatory justice.” However, the UK has previously rejected calls for slavery reparations.  In 2024, Keir Starmer’s government insisted the UK would not pay reparations for the part it played in the transatlantic slave trade, with some estimates putting the potential bill at £18 …

Florida’s new history course whitewashes the founders on slavery

Florida’s new history course whitewashes the founders on slavery

Florida has long been a laboratory for autocracy. Several of the Trump administration’s most extreme policies were piloted there, including aggressive immigration enforcement, the systematic rollback of civil rights and voter suppression. Now the Sunshine State is offering a new experiment: a high school history course offering a conservative interpretation of American history and a corrective to the official Advanced Placement U.S. History curriculum, which more than half a million students took last year, and that most historians and educators consider to be ideologically well-balanced. Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis and the state’s education department have attacked the AP course as “woke” and unpatriotic because it examines the complexities of American history including White on Black chattel slavery, the genocide of First Nations peoples and other realities that puncture sacred civic myths such as American exceptionalism and the fantasy that America is, and has always been, the greatest country in the world. The scope of Florida’s latest right-wing project is ambitious, and part of a three-year campaign, according to a recent report by Dana Goldstein …

How Not to Understand Slavery

How Not to Understand Slavery

Matt Walsh would like you to know you’ve been lied to. Last month, the right-wing provocateur appeared on Megyn Kelly’s show to discuss his new video series, Real History With Matt Walsh. “When you really start getting into it,” Walsh told Kelly, “you realize that, wow, they really lied about everything.” He begins the series by examining the practice of chattel slavery, he said to Kelly, “because this is, we’re told, the original sin” of the United States. In Walsh’s account, the left believes that “America was built on slavery, and it has no right to exist, and every white American carries, somehow, that legacy, that guilt in their blood”; therefore progressives feel they have the “moral justification to just do whatever they want” to white people. Walsh intends to stop this. So in Real History, he relentlessly downplays the brutality of slavery in the United States. Sanitizing slavery has become a core objective of the reactionary right under Donald Trump—a malignant response to the progressive left’s oversimplification of American history for their own present-day …