Annette Gordon-Reed

Uprooting Rights

The draft opinion looks back longingly to a nineteenth-century understanding of who was in control and whose lives mattered.

On the Trail Blazed by W.E.B. Du Bois

“Writing, teaching, activism, organizing—he did everything. And I feel a responsibility, or desire, to reach as many people as I can with my writing that grows out of my interest in the Black struggle.”

The Color Line

W.E.B. Du Bois’s exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition offered him a chance to present a “graphical narrative” of the dramatic gains made by Black Americans since the end of slavery.

Hopes for the American Experiment

Rebellious History

How should historians construct a more complete and truthful version of the past?

People Living While Black & the Police

There is no doubt that our country’s troubled racial history has helped shape current attitudes. It should not surprise us that the police more often apply that discretion to black people in degrading and dangerous ways.

The Real Texas

People go to Texas seeking fortunes, hoping to find a place somewhere between what is real and what is myth; it is strange and disturbing that this hope resembles the feeling that brought Anglo settlers, along with the people they enslaved, into the region so long ago.

MLK: What We Lost

Figures like Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks have now become “safe” in ways they never were when they were operating at the height of their powers.

Female Trouble

‘What Happened’ by Hillary Rodham Clinton

Jefferson & Charlottesville

Americans have been trying to claim, or use, Thomas Jefferson in one way or another from the time of his death in 1826 up until this very moment.

Our Trouble with Sex: A Christian Story?

Geoffrey Stone’s ‘Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America’s Origins to the 21st Century’

The Captive Aliens Who Remain Our Shame

On the origins of racial exclusion in the society that would become the United States of America.