By 1800, most Northern States had, or were about to, pass legislation that made slavery illegal. Following the Revolution, freedom of blacks had been a cause with legal cases brought more »
Tag: Black History Month
The National Museum of African American History and Culture has in its collections a copy of Twelve Years a Slave: The Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped more »
Anyone interested in knowing more about the African diaspora, American slavery, or the twentieth century African American migration to northern U.S. cities will find insights at the National Museum of more »
Please note that this posts links to collection items originally published in the latter half of the 19th century. The text contained in these publications should be considered in a more »
February 14th, 2018 marks the 200th birthday (observed) of Frederick Douglass. Interested in contributing to his legacy? Join the Transcribe-a-thon organized by Colored Conventions and the Smithsonian Transcription Center. Autobiographies more »
This post was written by Brittney Falter, a graduate student at George Mason University and social media intern at the Smithsonian Libraries. Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio more »
At the beginning of February, Black History Month, the former slave Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) was much in the news. The most prominent African American of the 19th century, he first moved to Washington, D.C. in the early 1870s after his home in Rochester, New York burned down. Here he published his newspaper, The New National Era. From 1877 until his death in 1895, Douglass lived and worked in a stately Victorian house, called Cedar Hill, overlooking the Anacostia River. The property is in the D.C. Southeast quadrant and has been maintained since 1988 as a National Historic Site by the National Park Service.