America’s southern gardens are beautiful, ambitious, and inseparable from the complex history that shaped them. Monty Don travels from Washington DC and Jefferson’s Monticello to Bunny Mellon’s Oak Spring, Charleston’s…
The Met recently acquired “Bélizaire and the Frey Children,” a 19th-century Louisiana portrait with a secret: For over a 100 years, the image of an enslaved child was erased. This…
While working on the WPA Florida guidebook, the Federal Writers’ Project team – including Zora Neale Hurston and Stetson Kennedy – documented a wide range of life from prison camps…
Why is the $ sign an S? What does 'dollar' even mean? In this video, I answer both of those questions, while also explaining what the British pound is a…
Did you know that Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of the Qur’an? That George Washington owned enslaved people who were Muslim? And that a Muslim diplomat broke his Ramadan fast…
Even before the United States was founded, tens of thousands of Muslims were already present, captured in West Africa and brought to colonial America in chains. Host Asma Khalid (NPR’s…
Follow Hannah Mayree, musician, banjo maker, and founder of the Black Banjo Reclamation Project, as they organize workshops and performances celebrating the banjo’s Black history.
Some people might think this book offers a smoking gun of complicity: Aha, those sanctimonious New Englanders were just as tied to slavery as the Southerners! But complicity seems too…
This episode looks at communities that have suffered neglect from official history, and the example of African American landmarks and burial grounds in Virginia. Some families and communities have pushed…