Mrs. Tamor and her six children. Helen and her son, a child of “tender years.” Margaret Garner, an “affectionate mother” […]
Bearing the Capitalist Economy: A Review of Alexandra J. Finley’s An Intimate Economy
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
[gpullquote class=”aligncenter”]“Enslaved women and their children enter the archives in little more than fragments.”1[/gpullquote] In George Sand’s 1832 idealist novel, […]
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 […]