One city, two kinds of Black life, and the train to Chicago.

Dodona Manor in Leesburg, Virginia, is now affiliated with the National Park Service. He was a soldier who earned the Nobel Peace Prize.

Before New Orleans, there were forty nations on the river. A Chitimacha medicine woman named Delphine Ducloux Stouff has let their voices live on.

The history of the land from George Washington, Arlington House, General Lee, and Queen City.

A barber, a clause that did not reach the District, and a Klansman's vote

Clipping found in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on 9/13/1937. U.S. Supreme Court Hugo Black revealed as Ku Klux Klan member

The 14th Amendment, Part One: A. Philip Randolph and why the fight for jobs went to the street instead of the Supreme Court.

The first Black officer in the United States Army earned his degree in Canada, because no American school would have him. Canada would not have given him the commission.

The people the Jesuits did not put on the ships stayed enslaved in St. Mary’s County for another twenty-six years, inside a community of the enslaved.

In 1838 the Maryland Jesuits sold the people they had baptized, and sent them to Louisiana because Louisiana was Catholic.

A county spent a lifetime deciding whose names its schools would bear. The Valley’s buried history tells the rest.

They made one American city unusable to slavery. The people they did it for are the ones the record lost.

How a woman born in rural Virginia built one of the world’s greatest African American research collections.

After March 1847, anyone an enslaver brought into Pennsylvania was free on arrival. Somebody had to reach them and say it out loud, in daylight. And Pittsburgh's Black community was ready.

In the decades before 1850, Pittsburgh's businesses and Black communities built systems at odds with each other. In between was a legal ambiguity. Until the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

A bill of sale, a proclamation, and the question that came back with armies.

Frederick Douglass demanded it in 1852. Martin Luther King Jr. demanded it again in 1963. In between, a man named John W. Jones spent nine years answering it himself.

Margaret Mercer was never quite either the villain or the hero. People died because of her convictions. At a personal cost, she purchased human beings to free them.

What we know gets called history. What we don't gets called a gap. At Belmont, the not knowing is the history.

The 10th Anniversary of the Opening of the NMAAHC

Jeffery Bennett and The Black Belt of VA: The Untold Stories of African American History

The French and Indian War, a dying general's sash, and a painting in my hometown.

The Black communities of Northern Virginia built schools, churches, and land. Fairfax, Loudoun, and Prince William Counties had other plans.

Danville, Virginia, 1963. There is more to this story.

From Amidst That Perfect Hail of Shot and Shell

The Freedmen's Memorial, April 14, 1876. Everyone knows Lincoln. Almost no one knows what Frederick Douglass said about him that day, or why it is relevant today.

The Black community that built this village, and the school that outlasted almost everything.

Walter White Was The Man They Didn't Know Was Black. Phillips County and the History of America.

How geography, commerce, slavery, and conscience divided a Virginia borderland before the Civil War.

In New Orleans, Black Catholic women received one tradition, remembered another, and built a faith the Church is still learning to see.

In a Society That Denied Enslaved People Legal Identity, the Church Wrote Their Names Down. And more...

How One Mother's Fight for Her Children Tested Freedom, Law, and the City That Shaped Her

A family night out.

Frederick Douglass, Irish America, and the Distance Between Welcome and Whiteness

The ties between Black freedom in America and civil rights in Northern Ireland

A visit to Monticello changed the way I think about Jefferson, memory, and the people who made Monticello possible. Both in 1991 and 2026.

Some parts of Harpers Ferry resist the structure of a larger narrative. They appear as fragments, memories, brief encounters, and lives only partly recorded.

From Harpers Ferry to a Reckoning at the End of The Civil War. We fought for a reason, and Lincoln's speech was appreciated by the people he freed.

From the ruins of the armory to the classrooms of Storer College, a new community took shape in Harpers Ferry.

How the rivers, mountains, maroons, and resistance traditions of the Shenandoah Valley shaped John Brown’s plan to strike slavery at Harpers Ferry.

Hearings, Votes, and the Shooting Start: How Congress Actually Enters America’s Post-WWII Wars

A reflection on a talk by Andrea Davis, Executive Director, Black Loyalist Heritage Centre, Birchtown, Nova Scotia

On the Shelburne riots of 1784, what started them, and what the law did afterward

What Lord Dunmore Promised, and What Francis Scott Key Celebrated.

On the Book of Negroes, what it recorded, and what it means to bring it home.

On Harry Washington, Lord Dunmore's Proclamation, and the story that begins in Northern Virginia.

Fairfax called it “separate but equal.” In practice, it was separate and unequal for generations. By choice.

A bridge from Willard’s story to Fairfax County’s schools. Separate, Unequal, and Close to Home... Just a bus ride away.

How a Manhattan homeless shelter and a Loudoun County cemetery both ask us to reckon with who we see—and who we’d rather forget.

How a Manhattan homeless shelter and a Loudoun County cemetery both ask us to reckon with who we see—and who we’d rather forget.