To find a previously undiscovered Underground Railroad site is the holy grail of historic preservation, according to attorney Michael Hiller, representing the Merchant's House Museum.
The moment a case is ruled a suicide, it's no longer investigated as a potential homicide. It defies logic to assume someone climbed eight or nine feet into a tree with a noose around their neck and hanged themselves. These cases deserve thorough homicide investigations from the start to ensure justice and accountability.
Truth be told, Reconstruction is not a fancy way of saying the Civil War. The term refers to the period after the Civil War, in which the former Confederate states were readmitted to the Union and had to adhere to the Constitution and federal statutes, particularly the newly-ratified 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, which abolished slavery, granted citizenship and the attendant rights to all persons born in the U.S. (including former slaves), and prohibited denial of voting rights based on race, respectively.
White genocide' Carl is a right-wing firebrand who played a minor role in the first Trump administration and has more recently gained, depending on your vantage, kudos or notoriety for his theory that Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart, as his book's subtitle puts it. He believes, for example, that a White genocide is underway and endorses the Great Replacement Theory (according to which elites in America and Europe are intentionally encouraging immigration to replace indigenous whites).
They began organizing themselves and eventually created the first self-governed, autonomous city for freed people. It was called Mitchelville, named for the Union army Maj Gen Ormsby Mitchel, who led what would become known as the Port Royal Experiment, a model for how the country might transition away from slavery that served as a precursor to the Reconstruction period.
From November 1909 until August 1912, an unknown assailant - or assailants - zigzagged across southwestern Louisiana and southeastern Texas. Many Black families were slaughtered in their homes under the cover of darkness. An ax - the telltale weapon - was almost always found in the bloody aftermath. All but one of the scenes were located within a mile of the Southern Pacific Railroad's Sunset Route. In each case, a mother and child were always among the victims.
Following the removal of a slavery exhibit at the former presidential homes of George Washington and John Adams in Philadelphia earlier this month, the municipal government is suing the US Department of the Interior and the National Park Service (NPS), claiming that the NPS acted outside of its authority. The exhibits memorialised the nine individuals Washington enslaved during his tenure in Philadelphia as the nation was being founded.
The American Civil War (1861-1865) was the pivotal event in United States history and the largest armed conflict in the Western world following the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) and prior to the beginning of the First World War (1914). The central cause of the war was the institution of slavery, which had increasingly caused conflict between Southern states, which relied heavily on slave labor for their agrarian economy, and Northern states, which were heavily industrialized and had far less need for slaves.
The next "Dying to Stay Here" podcast will feature a panel discussing what we call our criminal justice system. The panel reflected on a recent election in California, where voters were asked, in plain language, whether they wanted to remove slavery from our constitution, where it's still allowed "as punishment for a crime," and voted to keep it. As we celebrate another Black History Month, I reflect on the disproportionate number of Black people behind bars.
The librarian sat me in front of a microfilm reader and brought out roll after roll of film. I stayed there for hours, squinting to decipher the archaic handwriting in the Free Negro Book, which was published annually in South Carolina before the Civil War. The names in each year's edition were alphabetized, but only roughly-all of the surnames starting with A came before all of the surnames starting with B, but Agee might come before Anderson, or it might come after.
On March 16, 1965, a thirty-nine-year-old woman named Viola Liuzzo got into a late-model Oldsmobile and drove eight hundred miles from her home in Detroit, Michigan, to Selma, Alabama. Days earlier, following the Bloody Sunday protests, where voting-rights demonstrators had been tear-gassed and beaten, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had issued an appeal to people of conscience across the country to come to Alabama and participate in what had already become one of the most consequential theatres in the movement for equality.
On Thursday, Mississippi Today reported that several officials, who requested anonymity out of fear of retribution, said NPS told them to remove visitor brochures from the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument and edit out details about Beckwith. Among the details reportedly flagged for removal: that Evers was found lying in a pool of blood after he was shot. The brochures referred to Beckwith as "a member of the racist and segregationist White Citizens' Council."
Carefully, he takes out a flier, yellowed and brittle with age. The text at the top is Vietnamese. Underneath there is English. It reads: Colored Gl's! The South Vietnamese people, who are struggling for their independence and freedom, are friends with the American colored people being victim of barbarous racial discrimination at home. Your battlefield is right in the USA! Your enemy is the war lords in the White House and the Pentagon!
U.S. president Donald Trump shared a racist video on his Truth Social account in which former American president and first lady Barack and Michelle Obama were depicted as apes. I was unsurprised, yet nonetheless disgusted. U.S. senator Jon Ossoff also found the video unacceptable. He said during a rally in Atlanta that Donald Trump was "posting about the Obamas like a Klansman."
But Brundage, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, does more than expand our understanding of a neglected aspect of Civil War history. His study offers a window into larger questions-about the evolution of laws of war and the definition of war crimes, about the ethical responsibility of combatants, about the growth of the nation-state and its attendant bureaucracy, and about the defining presence of race in the morality play of American history.
Crews dismantled plaques telling the stories of the nine enslaved people who lived in the President's House in Philadelphia, and were owned by George Washington.
John from New Mexico, a self-professed lifelong Republican, called into C-Span's Washington Journal earlier this month with penitence on his mind. I voted for the president and supported him, he began. But I really want to apologize. The caller said he had been staring at an image Americans have seen far too often in recent days: Barack and Michelle Obama, the former president and first lady, with their mouths stretched into grotesque grins and their faces affixed to the bodies of apes.