The Big Isms

In the News


How the Founder of California's First Black Church Fought Its Last Known Slavery Case (audio)
Asal Ehsanipour, May 16, KQED



Many people may believe that California’s admission to the union as a free state in 1850 meant slavery did not exist, or that California was a safe haven for African Americans and other people of color. However, pro-slavery attitudes — and even slavery itself — remained rampant well after 1850. Here is the story of California’s last known slave case, the state’s first Black church and how they converge with the unknown history of a free laundryman named Daniel Blue.

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The West is relevant to our long history of anti-blackness, not just the South
Walter Johnson, May 17, 2020, The Washington Post



Two hundred years ago, Northern and Southern politicians came together to sign the Missouri Compromise. The bill, which admitted Missouri to the union as a slave state, Maine as a “free” state, and drew a line to the Pacific at 36 degrees 30 minu…

The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying
Adam Serwer, May 8, 2020, The Atlantic



Six weeks ago, Ahmaud Arbery went out and never came home. Gregory and Travis McMichael, who saw Arbery running through their neighborhood just outside of Brunswick, Georgia, and who told authorities they thought he was a burglary suspect, armed themselves, pursued Arbery, and then shot him dead.

The local prosecutor, George E. Barnhill, concluded that no crime had been committed. Arbery had tried to wrest a shotgun from Travis McMichael before being shot, Barnhill wrote in a letter to the police chief. The two men who had seen a stranger running, and decided to pick up their firearms and chase him, had therefore acted in self-defense when they confronted and shot him, Barnhill concluded. On Tuesday, as video of the shooting emerged on social media, a different Georgia prosecutor announced that the case would be put to a grand jury; the two men were arrested and char…

David Guzman  May 5, 2020, Black Perspectives



The study of slavery in New England has experienced something of a revival in the last decade. Given that New England is often treated as a hub of liberty after the American Revolution, colonial America scholar Jared Ross Hardesty joins a number of historians in dissociating the region from the parochialism and exceptionalism given to it in earlier studies. In his book, **Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England, Hardesty convincingly argues that New England should be a part of a wider story of slavery and colonization in the Americas. Meant as a synthetic history, Hardesty treads the same path as Lorenzo Johnston Greene did in his 1942 work, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776. Updated with the latest scholarship on the subject, Hardesty’s work offers a brief and concise history of slavery in New England.

Utilizing a settler-colonial framework of analysis for much of his work, Harde…