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- Sarah Prager, “How Mail Delivery Has Shaped America,” JSTOR Daily (March 12, 2025): LINK. African Americans have been part of the postal system, unofficially or officially, since the nation’s founding. As enslaved messengers, Black people delivered items between plantations and towns; Black postmasters faced racial violence when they emerged as federal appointees in the 19th century; and activists have used the U.S. mails for campaigns and political organizing for more than two centuries.
- Claire C. Carter, “As NC History Center in Fayetteville nears milestone, historian raises question about mission,” The Fayetteville (NC) Observer (March 14, 2025): LINK. A dispute over interpretation at a new North Carolina historic site devoted to the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction. Some critics say the museum is downplaying slavery and misrepresenting the gains achieved during Reconstruction; others still focus on “heritage.”
- Chandelis Duster, “Congress reignites a bipartisan effort to ban hair discrimination,” National Public Radio (March 12, 2025): LINK. The CROWN (Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair) Act of 2025 was introduced in the House of Representatives last month. If enacted, it will ban discrimination based on hairstyles or hair texture associated with a specific race. This includes “[hair that is] tightly coiled or tightly curled, locs, cornrows, twists, braids, Bantu knots, and Afros.”
- Ana Lucia Araujo, “A New History of Atlantic Slavery from the Global South,” Politics and Rights Review (March 11, 2025): LINK. Howard University historian Ana Lucia Araujo discusses her latest book, Humans in Shackles (University of Chicago Press, 2024). She argues, among other points, that “the lived experiences of enslaved women are crucial to understanding slavery and its aftermath in the Americas.”
- Lisa Friedman, “E.P.A. Plans to Close All Environmental Justice Offices,” New York Times (March 11, 2025): LINK. A proposed cut by the Trump administration “effectively ends three decades of work at the [Environmental Protection Agency] to try to ease the pollution that [disproportionately] burdens poor and minority communities, which are frequently located near highways, power plants, industrial plants and other polluting facilities. Studies have shown that people who live in those communities have higher rates of asthma, heart disease and other health problems, compared with the national average.”
- “The Murdaugh Family: A History of Slave Ownership,” My Heritage Blog (March 10, 2025): LINK. A micro-history of one prominent slave-holding family in South Carolina and the “complex and painful legacy that still lingers in the shadows of their modern-day influence.”
- Scott Spillman, “How a Group of 19th-Century Historians Helped Relativize the Violent Legacy of Slavery,” Literary Hub (March 10, 2025): LINK. “[U.B. Phillips was] the first professional historian of American slavery, writing books and articles in the early decades of the twentieth century that redefined the way the subject was studied. Despite, or perhaps because of, their frank statements about Black inferiority and the beneficence of slavery, they stood as the standard histories until the 1950s. Even today, their influence lingers.”
- Andrew Zonneveld, “Anti-Confederate movement heats up in Stone Mountain,” Atlanta Community Press Collective (March 8, 2025): LINK. “Controversy over a city cemetery in Stone Mountain [Georgia, home of the world’s largest Confederate monument] is once again exposing a long and unresolved community struggle against neo-Confederate and far-right forces.”