The April issue of Smithsonian magazine featured a piece entitled “Inside America’s Auschwitz,” on the Whitney Plantation as “a rebuke – and an antidote to our sanitized history of slavery.” I came across this piece online, and I was drawn to the provocative headline as well as the setting, a town less than an hour…
We’ve had a lot of bad presidents. But David Frum thinks the one we inaugurated on Friday is the worst — ever. And he’s making very clear that his characterization includes all the men who’ve led the country. The worst human being ever to enter the presidency, and I include all the slaveholders. — David…
Delaware Governor Jack Markell, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery in the United States, announced on Sunday a resolution to officially apologize for his state’s role in slavery. “We must publicly and candidly acknowledge the lasting damage of past sins – damage that continues to reverberate more than 150 years after…
Delaware Governor Jack Markell issued a posthumous pardon for Samuel Burris on Monday in the same courtroom where the free black man was convicted 168 years ago of helping slaves escape through the Underground Railroad. Burris’ descendants gathered in a courtroom in Dover, Delaware, to accept the pardon that set aside his 1847 criminal record…
Montreal businessman Steve Maman said his Jewish background has stirred his efforts to save Yazidi and Christian children from ISIS. Maman is the founder of the Liberation of Christian and Yazidi Children of Iraq project, which he said has saved 128 girls and young women from sex slavery and abuse at the hands of the…
1. Bat Shit on the Cave Floor In a forest in Kentucky there’s a hole in the ground that was once full of bat shit. The bats are mostly gone now. A bat plague hit here last year, and when you follow the sloping sidewalk down into the hole today, you step into a silent…
‘The word ‘slave’ is used in this exhibition,” notes a wall text at “Jews in the Caribbean: Four Centuries of History in Suriname and Curacao” at Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum. “The museum is aware of the controversial nature of this term. ‘Slaves,’ as used here, refers to African men, women, and children taken captive and…
The 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the United States — Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment in late January 1865 — comes at an fraught moment in the history of race relations. Considering that black men are being killed by police at the same rate as they were lynched in the era of Jim Crow,…
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