Frederick Douglass

In the wake of vitriolic red-hat patriotism distorting the nation’s history, this essay revisits Frederick Douglass’s deftly critical work to ask.

One monument’s story shows just how quickly a nation’s ideals can erode.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton believed that she was a person of “superior intelligence and courage.” This fuelled her radical politics—and her descent into bigotry.

William Goodell was praised by Frederick Douglass for being among the most important opponents of slavery in his time.

The survival of slave trading during the Civil War suggests that enslaved people remained valuable commodities in a time of economic upheaval.

The web of Atlantic trading routes and solidarity among maritime workers meant a fugitive's chances of reaching freedom below deck were better than over land.

The progress we have seen toward civil rights for all Americans is inseparable from the history of classical liberalism.

On the early history of Black participation in America's pastime.

For strivers like Lincoln, guides to rhetoric had a special currency in the nineteenth century.

The Trump campaign is signaling that it intends to make the U.S. a "Christian nation." Here's what that idea looked like in history.

One of the country’s greatest rhetorical traditions still has the power to remind us of our founding principles.

What 220 years of Haitian independence means for how we tell the story of abolition and the development of human rights around the world.

A discussion on the difficulty of keeping faith in a foundationally anti-Black republic.

John Brown and the Secret Six—the abolitionists who funded the raid on Harpers Ferry—confronted a question as old as America: When is violence justified?

On the trail of whales, Melville, and Douglass in New Bedford.

During the Jim Crow era, working-class Washingtonians' recreation options were far more limited—and dangerous.

This is the story of how a visit by Frederick Douglass to south-central Massachusetts, epitomizes the movement’s ability to spread in the region.

James Oakes’s deeply researched book argues that two very different readings of the 1787 charter put the United States on a course of all but inevitable conflict.

A new book offers the first full-length biography of newspaper editor, labor leader and minister Samuel Ringgold Ward.

The demand of antislavery activists for accused fugitives to be guaranteed a jury trial was an implicit recognition of Black citizenship.