History

Joseph Cinque (Sengbe Pieh) was a Sierra Leonean slave who led an uprising on the Spanish slave ship, La Amistad. Later Pieh and the other slaves involved in the revolt were put on trial for the death of two...

Seriki Williams Abass was a renowned slave merchant during the 19th century and a former paramount ruler of Badagry. Born Ifaremilekun Fagbemi in Joga-Orile, a town in Ilaro, Ogun State, Seriki Abass was captured as a slave by a Dahomean...

Drapetomania was a conjectural mental illness that, in 1851, American physician Samuel A. Cartwright hypothesized as the cause of enslaved Africans fleeing captivity. Samuel Cartwright was a medical doctor in the proslavery South. He supported slavery and even used medicine...

A statue of 18th-century slave trader Robert Milligan has been removed from outside a museum in the British capital after Labour councils pledged to begin reviewing such monuments in their areas amid anti-racism protests across the country triggered by...

Throughout the antebellum era, slave breeding was a highly profitable investment. Slaves were scarce. The cheap labor they provided in plantations wasn’t cheap anymore and slave children sold like wildfire. The couple of years following the prohibition of slave importation...

Domingo Biohó Also known as Domingo Biohó, was born in the 15th century into a royal family that ruled Bioho one of the Bissagos Islands off the coast of what is today Guinea-Bissau. He was kidnapped by the Portuguese...

Born in the Egba Land of the Yoruba people of West Africa at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Madam Efunroye Tinubu was a politically significant figure in Nigerian history because of her role as a powerful female aristocrat...

Fearing that black literacy would prove a threat to the slave system whites in many colonies instituted laws forbidding slaves to learn to read or write and making it a crime for others to teach them. In the United States,...

Arthur William Hodge was a plantation farmer and notoriously cruel slave owner in the British Virgin Islands, who was hanged in 1811 for the murder of one of his slaves. He was the first and only British slave owner to...

During the late 1800s, 19th and early 20th centuries, the shocking display of human beings of various African ethnicities was in vogue in the West, especially in the colonial empires of Great Britain, France, and Germany. In the era before...