Book review: Freedom’s Women
As we close out Black History Month, and begin Women’s History Month, this seems like a fitting time to discuss how black women in the region of Milliken’s Bend were affected by the war. One of the finest works I more »
Category Archives: Black history
Contrabands: a new life of freedom or a return to slavery?
In 1861, at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, Union general Benjamin Butler refused to return three runaway slaves to their owners, even though Federal law required him to do so under the Fugitive Slave Act. Butler had a different take. Southern law more »
Linking the Freedmen to the former slaveholder
As a genealogist, archivist, and historical researcher, I know that one of the most difficult tasks for people tracing their Southern African American ancestry is to find generations before 1870. The 1870 Federal census marked the first time that persons more »
Book review: Roll Jordan Roll
One of the finest works on American slavery is Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made.Written in 1974 by the late Eugene Genovese, it is a study that still stands the test of time. Genovese’s focus is on the more »
Who freed the slaves?
It often bothers me when I hear people say, “Lincoln set the slaves free.” He did not. What he did do was to issue a proclamation that – by declaration – freed those persons held in bondage in certain specific more »