slavery

April 1, 2015 - Last week, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic and several scholars gathered at Duke University to discuss reparations and the moral debt the U.S. owes to African Americans for centuries of oppression. While resistance to reparations is great, the panelists discussed why a serious consideration of them could transform the country.

December 2, 2014 - Edward Baptist's rigorously researched book interweaves economic analysis of the slave trade and the production that came from it with heartbreaking stories of the lives and suffering of the people who were enslaved.

July 3, 2014 - Political psychologists distinguish between "blind patriotism" that's intolerant and unquestioning and "constructive patriotism," which welcomes questioning with the hope of creating positive change. On this most patriotic of holidays, we share some of our favorite writings and songs in the spirit of the latter, and we invite you to do the same.

June 19, 2014 - Today marks the holiday that commemorates the day in 1865 that slaves in Texas were finally set free. We celebrate with a song to honor the occasion by jazz great Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five, "Juneteenth Jamboree."

March 25, 2014 - The film about the experience of a free black man kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana downplayed revolt -- despite its prominent place in Solomon Northup's autobiography.

March 13, 2014 - This week Glenn Ford, a black man wrongfully convicted of murder by an all-white jury in Louisiana, was freed after spending 30 years on death row at the state's notorious Angola penitentiary. What did he endure in a place where a federal judge has ruled conditions amount to "cruel and unusual punishment"?

December 17, 2013 - The private prison industry is fueling high incarceration rates in Mississippi and elsewhere in the United States. It's a way to keep an indentured class in a state and nation built on slavery.