As the guest editors and article authors of the December 2022 JCWE special issue, "Archives and Nineteenth-Century African American History" demonstrate, there is no perfect archive.  Historians must therefore read every imperfect archive with a particular perspicacity, to uncover the histories so many archives were meant to suppress or erase.[1] ...
Read More

In 1985, The Historic New Orleans Collection purchased one of the few known nineteenth-century paintings of a free woman of color in the United States. François Fleischbein’s Portrait of a Free Woman of Color, completed in 1837, is mounted in an elaborate and expensive goldleaf frame. The woman wears a ...
Read More

On this first day of December, we share our first Field Dispatch from Martha S. Jones, the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. Her most recent work is Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America, forthcoming in 2018 from ...
Read More

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 ...
Read More