Articles

A little over two years into his imperial administration, the Roman emperor Titus (r. 79-81 CE) and a retinue of followers traveled to the Sabine countryside for a respite. As they made the overland journey, Titus quickly realized something...

James Drummond MacGregor (1759-1830) was a Presbyterian minister in Pictou, Nova Scotia, who became the first published abolitionist in Canada through his A Letter to a Clergyman Urging Him to Set Free a Black Girl He Held in Slavery (1788...

Enslaved Blacks in the United States, seeking freedom, often fled to Canada, especially after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 compelled citizens in free states to help slave-catchers apprehend them. Although they frequently faced racial prejudice...

Among the most daring escapes from slavery in the United States in the 19th century was the flight of Ellen and William Craft from the slave state of Georgia to the free state of Pennsylvania in 1848. Ellen (1826-1891), a light-skinned Black...

Jane Johnson (circa 1814/1827-1872) and her two young sons, Daniel and Isaiah, were slaves of one John Hill Wheeler of North Carolina, who brought them north to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on his way to New York in July 1855 en route to a...

William "Box" Peel Jones was an enslaved African American who, in 1859, was shipped in a box from an unknown location to the home of the abolitionist William Still (1819-1902) in Philadelphia and then traveled on, with assistance from the...

Roman women faced legal, ideological, and cultural limitations in several areas of their lives; deep-rooted traditions regarding the role of women in the Roman world resulted in pre-conceived views which saw women characterised by weakness...

One of the most coveted projects of Italian colonial policy was to secure an African colony in the Mediterranean. For this reason, Italy fought and won the Italo-Turkish war of 1911-1912 for the control of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. These...

The origins of the First World War (1914-18) are many and varied, with some even dating back several decades, but a political assassination in the Balkans in the summer of 1914 was the spark that blew up Europe's political powder keg, that...

Slaveholders in the United States frequently claimed that Blacks were 'happy' to be slaves and could, in no way, function as free people as they would find freedom 'burdensome' – a claim fully articulated by slavery apologist T. R. Dew's...