Historians have long marked President Abraham Lincoln’s January 1, 1863, Emancipation Proclamation as the harbinger of immediate, uncompensated emancipation in both the Confederacy and the Border States. However, as my new book, Counting the Cost of Freedom (UNC Press, 2025) argues, that outcome was far from certain in 1863. In ...
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On this first day of December, we share our first Field Dispatch from Martha S. Jones, the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. Her most recent work is Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America, forthcoming in 2018 from ...
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