Teaching about slavery entails teaching about the archive. Punctuated with silences, scattered with compelling details, and laden with descriptions that oscillate between racist, harrowing, and heartbreaking, runaway ads provide a glimpse into the lives of enslaved people. The details embedded within them--or omitted from them--can also provide…

In November of 2016, Laurent Dubois discussed the importance of Haiti in writing the history of slavery, freedom, and human rights in the Atlantic World during the Age of Revolutions for Aeon. He explained that histories of modern political thought and culture underestimated the Haitian Revolution due to the lack of written sources by the enslaved…

Regular incidents of police brutality towards African Americans, who continue to experience high poverty and incarceration rates, illustrate that the tragic and divisive effects of racism are still present, even 150 years after slavery in the United States was officially ended. In fact, ongoing struggles for racial justice in the United States and…

The debate about how slavery as a central issue in American history should be presented in history education often forces teachers and students alike to wrestle with how their contemporary positionality is reflected in classroom subject matter that cannot, and should not, be avoided. This article is an overview of the historiography of resistance…

History education rests at the junction between historical content, disciplinary literacy, and educational psychology. To understand the sources and strategies that facilitate historical thinking, more inquiries are needed. How do students respond to different historical topics, texts, and tasks? Which sources and strategies best facilitate…

In this essay, I compare "Django Unchained," directed by Quentin Tarantino in 2012, which relies on common tropes about slavery and largely silences the experiences of enslaved women, to "Daughters of the Dust," directed by Julie Dash in 1991, a film that focuses on black womanhood in the post-Reconstruction era on the eve of…

Those who frequently encounter history-based children's literature view it quite differently. Writers craft the storytelling for young readers; young readers want to be engaged; teachers want the books read; publishers want the books sold; and history education researchers worry about emergent patterns of historical representation (and…

Tony Waters, a sociologist at California State University, Chico, has raised an interesting issue about the intellectual conflict some of his students experienced when they arrived on campus and enrolled in American history classes. He reported students were perplexed to find there were two kinds of American history--the version they learned in…

Teaching an introductory survey course in a typical lecture hall presents a series of related obstacles. The large number of students, the size of the room, and the fixed nature of the seating tend to maximize the distance between instructor and students. That distance then grants enrolled students enough anonymity to skip class too frequently and…

Slavery in the pre-Civil War United States is a hard topic to teach, not only because it raises issues of racism and injustice, but also because students assume so much. Often, they think all northerners were abolitionists or "good guys" and southerners were "bad guys" who enslaved African Americans because they viewed them as inferior. England,…

In 1860, 226,000 (47 percent) of the US' 478,000 free blacks lived in free states, and thus totaled over five percent of the black population in America. Though oppressed by popular prejudice and a range of legal and institutional constraints--in 1847, blacks at a convention labeled themselves "slaves of the community"--African Americans outside…

While Blackface minstrel performances today are considered inappropriate and many Americans find the language and images racially offensive, such performances were the "most popular entertainment" in antebellum America. Songs about idyllic plantation life in the South resonated with Americans adjusting to the new industrial cities of the North.…

The political science and sociology conceptual foundations of Stanley Elkin's "Slavery" and John Blassingame's "The Slave Community" are analyzed and compared. (DE)

Instant mass popularity of "Time on the Cross" as a technology-based re-evaluation of the slave system is traced; the furor it created in history and economics circles is described; and specific challenges which led to its demise as a credible document are related. (AV)

Surveyed is the recent historiography of the moral dimensions of war, revolution, slavery, and cultural decline, showing gaps that need to be filled and pointing to pioneering works of moral history written mostly by nonhistorians. The outline of a new moral history is sketched and implications for higher education suggested. (RM)