Juneteenth: Emancipation Day

The Emancipation Proclamation is one of the most important documents in American history.

Shot on the Senate floor by a young Black man, a dying racist senator summons an elderly Black Baptist minister from Oklahoma to his side for a remarkable dialogue that reveals the deeply buried secrets of their shared past and the tragedy that reunites them.

When Major General Gordon Granger announced the end of legalized slavery in the state, African-Americans played an integral role in the Texas story. Reworking the traditional "Alamo" framework, she powerfully demonstrates, among other things, that the slave- and race-based economy not only defined the fractious era of Texas independence but precipitated the Mexican-American War and, indeed, the Civil War itself.

Though often consigned to the footnotes of history, African American women are a significant part of the rich, multiethnic heritage of Texas and the United States

While some scholars imply that only the struggle for freedom was legitimate, Jenny Sharpe complicates the linear narrativeOCofrom slavery to freedom and literacyOCothat emerged from the privileging of autobiographical accounts like that of Frederick Douglass.

After the Civil War, African Americans placed poignant "information wanted" advertisements in newspapers, searching for missing family members.

Out of the hundreds of published slave narratives, only a handful exist specific to South Carolina, and most of these are not readily available to modern readers.

Helen Thomas's study opens a new avenue for Romantic literary studies by exploring connections with literature produced by slaves, slave owners, abolitionists and radical dissenters between 1770 and 1830.

These autobiographies of Afro-American ex-slaves comprise the largest body of literature produced by slaves in human history.

First published in 1867, Slave Songs of the United States represents the work of its three editors, all of whom collected and annotated these songs while working in the Sea Islands of South Carolina during the Civil War, and also of other collectors who transcribed songs sung by former slaves in other parts of the country.