#atlantic-slave-trade

#atlantic-slave-trade

Karen Batchelor's discovery of her eligibility for the Daughters of the American Revolution was surprising, given the organization's long history of racism and elitism.

Egypt was one of the great crossroads of the medieval world, with many travelers journeying there and recording their impressions of the country and its people.

The case is one of the most notorious examples of British involvement in illegal enslavement in Brazil, said historian Joseph Mulhern and a stark symbol of how, even after the UK Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, British citizens and companies profited from slavery in Latin America's biggest country for another half century.

Cacheu, located in present-day Guinea-Bissau, was a small but vital Atlantic port where African, European, and Afro-Portuguese communities interacted daily. It functioned as a hub linking West Africa to Brazil and the wider Atlantic world. Rather than presenting Cacheu as a peripheral outpost of European expansion, Green shows it to be a dynamic society with its own social hierarchies, customs, and systems of authority.

Walking through Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imaginationat the Museum of Modern Art, I noticed that the exhibition didn't have definite sections or texts, and the wall labels abstained from naming the nationalities of the photographers. It was an invigorating experience to be in a show that eschews geographic boundaries set up by Western nations, as well as rejects a cause-and-effect narrative that centers Western colonialism as a framework for understanding African aesthetic production.

On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron appeared before the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland the annual Alpine gathering of the global elite to declare that now is not a time for new imperialism or new colonialism. This, of course, was a reference to the current ambitions of Macron's counterpart in the United States, Donald Trump, who, in addition to recently kidnapping the president of Venezuela and repeatedly threatening to seize the Panama Canal,

In the coastal city of Trujillo, he'd observed how the US-owned United Fruit Company dominated the city's railways and docks and wielded significant political influence. This inspired his novel "Cabbages and Kings" (1904), in which he wrote about the fictional republic of Anchuria — a 'small, maritime banana republic' whose government bent to the interests of a powerful foreign corporation.

Otherworldly forms greet you at the entrance to the exhibition, transporting you into a kaleidoscopic, dream-like space. A voice speaks in the background as projected images dance across the forms, animating the space. "It's been really beautiful to see her work come alive, become a landscape ... where you can traverse and kind of get lost," curator Fabiola R. Delgado says of Lisu Vega's "The Uncertain Future of Absence (El Futuro Incierto de la Ausencia)" (2025).

From Senegal to Somalia and Egypt to South Africa, credit alert notifications from fintech apps such as Western Union or WorldRemit often set the mood for the rest of the day, week or even month. Transfers from workers within the continent and the diaspora to their relatives are often referred to as the black tax, whereby one person's salary and relative success can become the safety net for a whole extended family.

Crews dismantled plaques telling the stories of the nine enslaved people who lived in the President's House in Philadelphia, and were owned by George Washington.

History is full of Black Francophone figures who have shaped politics, culture, science, and resistance across continents. Yet too often, they remain invisible in school textbooks. These individuals challenged colonial power, redefined identity, confronted racial hierarchies, and transformed intellectual and political life in the Francophone world and beyond. From West Africa to the Caribbean, in scientific research and political activism, they forged new paths in the face of oppression and erasure, leaving legacies that continue to inspire freedom, dignity, and solidarity.

The librarian sat me in front of a microfilm reader and brought out roll after roll of film. I stayed there for hours, squinting to decipher the archaic handwriting in the Free Negro Book, which was published annually in South Carolina before the Civil War. The names in each year's edition were alphabetized, but only roughly-all of the surnames starting with A came before all of the surnames starting with B, but Agee might come before Anderson, or it might come after.

To be Black in the U.S. has such an expansive meaning that traces back to Europeans deciding who got to be "white." While some people, like the Italians and Irish, earned their way into "white-ness," those with even a drop of Black in their heritage were relegated to the lower rungs of the racial ladder.

The American Civil War (1861-1865) was the pivotal event in United States history and the largest armed conflict in the Western world following the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) and prior to the beginning of the First World War (1914). The central cause of the war was the institution of slavery, which had increasingly caused conflict between Southern states, which relied heavily on slave labor for their agrarian economy, and Northern states, which were heavily industrialized and had far less need for slaves.