The historiography of women’s lives under and role in slavery and the slave trade has changed substantially in the recent […]
Why I Say “Black Lives Matter”
Two paragraphs in my forthcoming book, Liberty and Insanity in the Age of the American Revolution, continue to haunt me. […]
Feeling Grief: On Emotions in the Archive of Enslavement
In September, when an archivist at Fisk University asked me to help identify a ten-page manuscript from 1776 Saint-Domingue, my […]
Family Separation Is Not Only an American Legacy — It’s a Racist One
When Attorney General Jeff Sessions imposed a new policy of “zero tolerance” for illegal immigration to the United States on April […]
Pokémon Go, Before and After August 12
Before I. It is early summer, 2018. I am a Virginian, but I have just moved to Charlottesville, Virginia after […]
Demanding to Be Heard: African American Women’s Voices from Slave Narratives to #MeToo
The #Metoo movement has made public what women have long known: that sexual assault and harassment are endemic in many […]
Locating Enslaved Black Wet Nurses in the Literature of French Slavery
“Enslaved women and their children enter the archives in little more than fragments.”1 In George Sand’s 1832 idealist novel, Indiana, […]
The Stain of Slavery is Silencing Sexual Violence Against Black and Brown Women
I am an American woman who has never experienced sexual assault, rape, or coercion. Bully for me, right? This detail […]
Remembering the Mothers of Gynecology: Deirdre Cooper Owens’ Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology
Antebellum physician James Marion Sims has been in the news quite a bit lately as a target of activism. After […]
Poison and Protest: Sarah Bassett and Enslaved Women Poisoners in the Early Modern Caribbean
In 2008, the government of Bermuda erected its very first monument to an enslaved person. The “Sally Bassett Memorial Statue” […]
