David W. Blight

Charles Ives and the Civil War.

Swarns’s book about a sale of enslaved people by Jesuit priests to save Georgetown University reminds us that the legacy of slavery is the legacy of resistance.

How should historians respond to the urgency of this current political moment?

From MLK to Obama, advancers for civil rights were driven by their fatherhood and dreams of better life for their own children.

An accounting of racist murders in nineteenth-century America.

Digging down into the roots of white America’s infatuation with Black.

From Phillis Wheatley to Lil Uzi Vert, Black names and their evolution tell the story of America.

A spectre is haunting houses—the spectre of possession.

The most influential preacher in the country, Beecher aggressively agitated for the Union to extend complete forgiveness to Confederates.

Her memoirs contribute to the inaccurate post-Civil War memory of the Southern plantation.

The GOP’s new embrace of Lincoln, emancipation, and Juneteenth is no sign of progress.

While focusing on refuting the Lost Cause narrative, many historians forget to memorialize Black Americans in the post Civil War period.

How today's protests are struggling to reclaim the vision of the great abolitionist leader.

The Great Toppling of 2020 and the rebirth of civic imagination.

In a newly discovered letter, the famed abolitionist wrote that “no one monument could be made to tell the whole truth.”

What would it mean to define the Civil War as a necessary and crucial final step in the long, even more tragic history of slavery in America?

Be Woke presents Black History in two minutes (or so).

Why did a predominantly black district have streets named after Southern generals? In Hollywood, Florida, one man thought it was time for change.

Never-before-transcribed articles from Frederick Douglass’ Paper denounce capitalism and economic inequality.

A dispute between some scholars and the authors of NYT Magazine’s issue on slavery represents a fundamental disagreement over the trajectory of U.S. society.