Anyone who’s read or seen Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible likely remembers Tituba, the enslaved woman who sets off the 1692 witch panic in Salem, Massachusetts. In literature and history, she’s been depicted as both a menacing Barbadian voodoo queen and a Black feminist touchstone. Who was the real Tituba? Read more…
Last summer on June 17, 2020, the Quaker Oats Company announced its decision to rename its Aunt Jemima pancake brand after 131 years. Public opinion since the announcement has been mixed. One camp believes that the change is long overdue. While another group believes there’s nothing wrong with the brand’s Read more…
Since her death in 1881 Marie Laveau has morphed from a respected and charitable neighbor, or a “she-devil” and mysterious Voodoo Queen (depending on whose talking), and into a saint of strong, Black, feminist womanhood. How do we separate popular history from fact? Today we are digging into the real Read more…
Late in 2020, a number of white academics were revealed to be passing as people of color, making the concept of racial passing a matter of national conversation. For these white folks, the benefits of being considered a person of color were based on a perception that minorities somehow have Read more…
Just two days before he left office, Donald Trump released a Report generated from the 1776 Commission, a presidential advisory committee he created in September 2020 to combat, in his words, the “wicked web of lies” in some versions of American history. The commission was sparked by the right-wing outrage Read more…
In June 2020, Quaker Oats announced they were revamping their famous (infamous?) brand of breakfast products, Aunt Jemima. From the late 19th century to the late 1980s, Aunt Jemima products prominently featured the image of the Black mammy trope to sell the idea that all white families could have the Read more…
Dueling seems crazy to us today. Two men take ten paces, turn to face each other, and stand still while they shoot to kill, all the while following strict rules. But while it’s easy to think of duels as simply evidence of a more violent age, dueling and other similar Read more…
Just over one month after the first shots of the Civil War were fired, three enslaved black men got into a row boat and paddled across the James River from mainland Virginia to the Union-occupied Fortress Monroe. Whether they knew it or not, the three young men – named Frank Read more…
What happens when you build an empire on sugar? Since the 18th century, sugar has been one of the most demanded commodities in the West. By the 1700s, technological advancements and production made sugar accessible to even some of the poorest Americans and Europeans, and imperial governments poured millions of Read more…
Like all things, “fatherhood” has a history. From the enslaved men of the Anglo-American Atlantic to the middling sort to working class daddies and “their chairs,” ideas about fatherhood across socio-economic status in the nineteenth century shared one common trope: fathers were supposed to be providers. This wasn’t always the Read more…