Tag Archives: black-history
Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley During the Civil War Era
The predominant narrative of the Civil War era regarding the Shenandoah Valley is that the Valley had comparatively little slavery, especially compared with the Tidewater area of Virginia, hence it was not as important as in other areas of Virginia, with the exception of what become West Virginia. Additionally, the Valley had little in common […]
My Bondage and My Freedom
This book by Frederick Douglass, which you can read for free here, here, here, and here, published in 1855, is his second of three autobiographies. In his Introduction historian Philip S. Foner tells us, “In 1855 Douglass wrote an enlarged edition of the Narrative which was published that same year by Miller, Orton and Mulligan […]
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass An American Slave
This book, written in 1845, is the first of three autobiographies Frederick Douglass wrote in his lifetime. He published the second, My Bondage and My Freedom, in 1855, and the third, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, in 1882. In his Introduction, Peter Gomes writes, “‘As a child,’ writes W. E. B. DuBois of […]
A Wrinkle in Time On the Grounds of an Infamous Civil War General’s Plantation
This article is from the Spring 2024 issue of Civil War Times magazine. “On a cloudless, deep-blue sky afternoon, I drive 45 miles south of Nashville to Columbia for a visit with one of my favorite people, Campbell Ridley. … Ridley’s roots run deep here in Maury County, one of the wealthiest counties in the […]
How the Word Is Passed
This book by journalist Clint Smith is part travel memoir and part synthesis of current historical scholarship on slavery and memory. He writes of his home town of New Orleans, “The echo of enslavement is everywhere. It is in the levees, originally built by enslaved labor. It is in the detailed architecture of some of […]
Student of the American Civil War 
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