Slavery - AAIHS

Black Women, Self-Making, and Liberty

Historian Tamika Nunley introduces At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery and Shifting Identities in Washington D.C. with the anecdote

In an 1851 report to the Louisiana Medical Association, New Orleans physician Samuel Cartwright coined the term “drapetomania”—the disease that

In the 1640s in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, Maria Portogoys, a “half free,” formerly enslaved woman, arranged that

The contemporary “discovery” of unmarked graves and unburied bodies of African Americans remains a disturbing reality of the Black experience.

*This post is part of our roundtable on “Contested Citizenship,” organized in collaboration with the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study