“I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery…” Kindred is a 1979 novel by Octavia Butler (1947-2006), an African American science fiction author. The story focuses on Dana, the main character, who is forced to travel through time between her...
Author and expert on modern slavery, Siddharth Kara, exposes the treacherous living and working conditions of Congolese mining communities in Cobalt Red. He makes it clear that we cannot ignore the cruelty used to produce our everyday devices. Cobalt is essential...
On June 2, 1863, during the U.S. Civil War, two Union Army gunships (the Harriet A. Weed and the John Adams — both converted ferryboats) carrying 150 soldiers proceeded up the Combahee River, about twenty miles south of Charleston, in the heart of South Carolina’s...
January 8-10 marks the anniversary of the Louisiana Rebellion of 1811, also known as the German Coast Uprising. At the time, it was the largest slave insurgency in the history of the United States, involving between 200-500 slaves fighting for their freedom. It is...
On October 16th, 1859, John Brown and eighteen of his comrades raided the U.S. Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. Their aim was to spark a slave insurrection that would destroy the southern slave economy, or at the very least to accelerate the...
