Clik here to view.
Handmade horrors
Next time you’re admiring that handmade carpet in a local store, you might want to think about more than just the color and texture. A recent study says there’s a good chance it was made by children...
View ArticleNotorious U.S. Supreme Court decision is revisited
Dred Scott. You don’t have to be a lawyer or historian to have that name conjure up feelings of horror and injustice. Scott was the American-born slave who lent his name to Dred Scott v. Sandford, the...
View ArticleKennedy Center to showcase A.R.T. production
The American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.) will join nine other theater groups to present at the 10th New Visions/New Voices festival this spring (April 25-27) at the John F. Kennedy Center for the...
View ArticleBorderless America
Sometimes what we call something changes the way we see it. Steven Hahn wants to call the groups of escaped slaves who found refuge in the northern United States prior to the Civil War “maroon...
View ArticleAfricans, ‘Africanness,’ and the Soviets
It’s no secret that a century and a half after the Civil War, the United States still struggles to come to terms with the legacy of African slavery. Much less well known in this country is the fact...
View ArticleK School celebrates Ida B. Wells with poster
The Kennedy School of Government (KSG) recently celebrated the launch of poster reproductions of the portrait of Ida B. Wells that hangs in the School’s Fainsod Room. The painting of Wells — a fierce...
View ArticleThe complex legacy of slavery in Brazil
In Heliópolis, a favela, or shantytown of São Paulo, Brazil, an annual tradition pits residents against one another for an epic soccer game. The match is called simply Pretos vs. Brancos, or “Blacks...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Johnson at 300
Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary of the English Language” was first published in 1755 as his attempt to both rein in and celebrate the galloping vigor of English. For 150 years, it was considered the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Slavery in 2010
Examples of modern-day slaves could be the workers who make our cotton shirts, pick cocoa for our chocolate, and harvest shrimp for our dinner plates while imprisoned aboard ships at sea. Enslaved...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The invention of childhood innocence
When Robin Bernstein was a little girl, she perused textbooks belonging to her mother, who was pursuing a degree in early childhood education. “Of course I didn’t understand them,” said Bernstein,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Slavery in the North, and more
When writer and reporter C.S. Manegold was in South Carolina researching slavery and The Citadel military college for her first book, she unwittingly found the unexpected subject for her second book....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Looking past the plantation
In 1836, Frank McWorter founded the town of New Philadelphia, Ill. McWorter, who owned a large farm nearby, used the sale of lots in the town not to enrich himself, but to buy his family out of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The value of women
If slavery and totalitarianism were the great moral issues of the 19th and 20th centuries, then the worldwide oppression of women and girls will be the defining issue of the 21st, said Nicholas D....
View ArticleClik here to view.
The landscape of slavery
For 45 minutes, Harvard historian Walter Johnson read from a chapter of his forthcoming book at the Radcliffe Gymnasium. An uneasy stillness filled the hall at the conclusion of his presentation. It...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fleeing America
Growing up, historian Maya Jasanoff traveled extensively over summers with her family from their Ithaca, N.Y., home to Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. “My love of history grew up in tandem with...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tocqueville’s Discovery of America
Ernest Bernbaum Research Professor on Literature Leo Damrosch retraces the nine-month journey through America by historian Alexis de Tocqueville, author of “Democracy in America,” who cannily...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Harvard and slavery
Harvard College came of age in the 17th and 18th centuries, a period with values often very different from our own. Slavery — which was legal in Massachusetts until 1783 — is a case in point. Did this...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Lincoln’s dimensions
The friendship between President Drew Faust and “Lincoln” screenwriter Tony Kushner dates to the spring of 2008, when Kushner came to campus to deliver the annual Tanner Lectures on Human Values. “I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The ‘last Renaissance man’
Placing Thomas Jefferson in the intellectual life of his times may best be understood by quoting the third U.S. president himself on the character of the first, George Washington, according to an...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Boston, hotbed of anti-slavery
Boston was the flashpoint of the American Revolution. It’s a city indelibly linked to many of the Founding Fathers, to the midnight ride of Paul Revere, and to George Washington’s fledgling...
View Article
