The American Revolution spurred the world’s first significant movement to abolish slavery and the African slave trade.[1] Before then, there was virtually no antislavery…
BOOK REVIEW: Washington at the Plow: The Founding Father and the Question of Slavery by Bruce A. Ragsdale (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021)…
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Teaching the American Revolution in the United Kingdom comes with baggage. But British students respond to it ways that an American might not expect….
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“His Britannic Majesty shall with all convenient speed, and without causing any Destruction, or carrying away any Negroes or other Property of the American…
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The two forces of paternalism and slavery shaped the lives of Loyalist slaveowners in the postwar British Empire. Historians rarely connect these forces in…
Over the next several weeks, we’ll be looking back in the Dispatches archives to replay a selection of notable interviews. In this episode, first…
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William “Will” Costin was found dead in his own bed on the morning of May 31, 1842. Washington City’s leading newspaper, the Daily National…
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In October 1774, in a stunning and radical move, delegates of the First Continental Congress signed a pledge for the thirteen mainland colonies not…
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The first article of this series discussed the increasing chorus of American Patriots in New England raising their voices against the African slave trade….
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The American Revolution changed the way Americans viewed one of the world’s great tragedies: the African slave trade. The long march to end the…
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Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution by Tyson Reeder. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019 America’s struggle for liberty ushered…
On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews Dean Caivano, Lecturer of Political Science at California State University, Stanislaus, on the growing resistance to tyranny as colonists…
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“Unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place,” Gen. George Washington wrote from Valley Forge on December 23, 1777,[1] to Henry Laurens, the…
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The threat of continued oppression and an encroaching condition of slavery was central to the American colonists’ call for separation from Great Britain and…
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Lord Dunmore, John Murray, the 4th Earl of Dunmore (1730-1809) and Royal Governor of Virginia (1771-1776),[1] was an important political and military figure during…
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For every historian, there’s an event that makes them feel good every time they read about it. We asked our contributors: What event from…
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Georgia’s fragile independence within the new American republic was shattered on December 29, 1778, when British troops attacked Savannah. Despite clear signs that the…
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Put yourself, in your mind’s eye, back in June 1776, specifically, the period between June 7 and July 1. It is precisely at that…
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It wasn’t really their fault, they said. Slavery, men of the founding generation liked to argue, was brought to the colonies by Britain. It…
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Having just attained his thirteenth (or eleventh) birthday, he found himself confined to a bed on the second floor of a small two-story house…
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The Molasses Act of 1733 levied a duty of six pence per gallon on foreign molasses imported into British colonies in North America. The…
November 10, 1775 was an important day in both Great Britain and America. Lord George Germain assumed duties as the Secretary of State for…
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The Revolutionary War took a heavy toll on Great Britain. The Treaty of Paris in 1783 left it not just bereft of former colonies…
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When Jacob Francis[1] began life on January 15, 1754 in western New Jersey’s Amwell Township in Hunterdon County, free black people in a state…
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As the battered Continental Army encamped in Valley Forge for the winter of 1777-1778 after a year of setbacks and defeats, Gen. James Varnum,…
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Generally when people think about slavery in the United States, they harken back to the Civil War period when Northern states had abolished slavery…
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As the colonies of South Carolina and Georgia moved closer to open rebellion against Great Britain in the summer of 1775, leaders of the…
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A frequent discovery when reading 18th Century newspapers is the runaway ads. In an era when people could be owned by or contractually bound…
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George Washington was a slave owner for his entire life, a fact that surprises many of his fellow citizens more than 200 years after…
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Could the new nation have thrived economically if slavery had been abolished when the colonies won independence? Probably would have thrived even more. …