Tag: antebellum America

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Congratulations to the 2023 Anne Braden Prize Winner

The Southern Historical Association is delighted to announce the winner of the Anne Braden Prize: Kimberly Welch, “The Stability of Fortunes: A Free Black Woman, Her Legacy, and the Legal Archive in Antebellum New Orleans,” JOURNAL OF THE CIVIL WAR ERA 12 (December 2022): 473-502. This prize, which was first ...
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States’ Rights and Antislavery Activism

Michael E. Woods, associate professor of history at Marshall University, has joined our team of Muster correspondents. He is the author of two books and several articles about politics in the antebellum period. Here he offers his first Field Dispatch. Let us know what you think in the comments! The ...
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New Political Histories of the Sectional Crisis: A Report from the AHA

In August 2016, Kenneth Osgood and Fredrik Logevall (fresh from winning the Pulitzer Prize for his recent book on the Vietnam War, Embers of War) co-authored an op-ed for the New York Times titled “Why Did We Stop Teaching Political History?”[1] Like so many nostalgic jeremiads, it assumes that we ...
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Philadelphia’s Civil War: New Documentary Depicts Racial Tensions in Wartime City

This post was written by Michael Johnson, a PhD student at George Washington University. The fourteen-part series “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment,” produced by Sam Katz and History Making Productions, traces the development of American ideals, character, and democracy over four centuries of one of the nation’s most crucial cities. Episode ...
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'Break Free’ From A One-Dimensional Portrayal of Slavery:  WGN’s new series, "Underground"

‘Break Free’ From A One-Dimensional Portrayal of Slavery: WGN’s new series, “Underground”

In the 1872 narrative, The Underground Rail Road, William Still stated that he owed “it to the cause of Freedom, and to the Fugitives and their posterity” to bring the activities of the Underground to “the public in the most truthful manner…to show what efforts were made and what success ...
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CSI:Dixie: A Grim Archive of Slavery’s Violence

On March 14, 1846, Abraham Jones, a coroner in Edgefield County, South Carolina, filed a report concerning the death of a female slave named Rose. According to the coroner, five days earlier a man named Robert Moore visited the home of Michael Long, a slaveholder who claimed Rose as his ...
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