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America’s annual celebration of Black History month honors the innumerable (and all too often, overlooked) contributions that African Americans have made to this country. It is also a time to strive for a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the role of race...

It’s June, and hurricane season has begun in the Atlantic region. Drawing on the discography of my recent book, Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Poetry, this blog post offers a disaster playlist to get you through these stormy...

On Veterans’ Day last year, the Equal Justice Initiative released a new report, “Lynching in America: Targeting Black Veterans,” that says, between 1877 and 1950, “no one was more at risk of experiencing violence and targeted racial terror than black veterans...

The following is an adapted excerpt from Sharon Ann Murphy’s Other People’s Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic. The decision to replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on future $20 bills is laced with irony. Born into slavery in...

Octavius McFarland was one of the millions of nameless, faceless slaves who toiled in Southern fields during antebellum times. His ceaseless labors made life comfortable for his white masters and fueled the booming Southern agrarian economy. His legal status...

By Bob Post My friend at the MIT Museum, Deborah Douglas, describes Who Owns America’s Past? as “part history, part memoir, part polemic.” Such a trifurcation was not really on my mind as I wrote, but now I know Debbie is spot on. The polemic concerns, first...