“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,”
President Donald Trump, 2025
Ignorance is strength I suppose. Trump, perhaps the least read and most historically illiterate president this country has ever had, continues his campaign of whitewashing American history. Trump’s sole understanding of slavery, it appears, is informed by Disney’s “Song of the South.”. A dated and romanticized depiction of slavery. The Trump White House is theater, an increasingly odd mix of minstrel show and Nuremberg Rally.
According to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, a museum is “an institution devoted to the procurement, care, study, and display of objects of lasting interest or value.” It should include ‘interpretation’ as well. But it is essentially correct in that it preserves things ‘of lasting interest and value.’
In America, that meant museums sidelining, excluding, or denigrating peoples and their cultural objects that did not conform to America’s myths of exceptionalism and manifest destiny, that shiny white city on the hill. Reducing the ‘other’ to an asterixis of history. More heritage and nostalgia than history.
The National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of African American History and Culture were remedies for this deliberate exclusion from America’s origin myths. Trump, however, wants to return America to a dated interpretation of our history by recasting the Smithsonian’s museum’s interpretations of our history back through the white male gaze.
Our history is complex with many paradoxes, for instance slavery and freedom. But one can’t speak to the future without knowing where we came from. America must confess to the sin of slavery before it can move on. Slavery was and is bad and showing slavery for what it was and is should not be controversial. Enlightened and benevolent plantation slave masters did not exist. A mature country, sure of itself and its future, acknowledges its horrific failures as well as its great successes. Obviously, despite his MAGA moniker, Trump really does not believe in America’s potential for greatness or future as a thriving pluralistic democracy.
Over generations, millions endured brutal dehumanizing conditions: Sexual assaults, beatings, whippings, amputations as punishment, malnutrition, murders, executions, burnings, hangings, forced sales and separations of children, wives, and husbands. This system of violence and oppression became the cornerstone America’s economic system from its founding to 1865. America was not merely a country with slaves, but a slave society.
African American history is American history. Africans were in North America even before the English, arriving as explorers with the Spanish. The first permanent presence of folks of African descent in English settlements arrived in 1619 near Jamestown, Virginia. With them came new foodways, new cosmologies, new medicines, new music, new cultural infusions that make us what we are today: American.
African American history is larger and more complex than just the institution of slavery, however. It’s a story about agency, determination, family, resilience, survival, and even thriving in the face of relentless state sanctioned violence to oppress and control.
If you are interested in your own further readings on the subject, below is my list of books that I think are worth a close read. The list is far from complete and is not meant as a comprehensive historiography of America’s ‘peculiar institution’ but merely a starting point for further exploration. They are not listed in any order, but there is a distinct Virginia tilt.
Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870. An excellent primer on the Atlantic Slave trade.
The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1689. Edited by Warren M. Billings. Traces Virginia’s establishment and legal evolution of race-based slavery through statutory acts. For example, in December 1662, Virginia’s General Assembly passed a law stating that “all children borne in this country shalbe held bond [slave] or free only according to the condition of the mother.”
Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery — American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. Argues that colonial Virginia’s long and deep experience with slavery is a central paradox in America’s revolutionary demands for freedom from English “slavery.”
Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Traces the transformation of society with slaves to a slave society and back again and how the relationship between enslaved and free continuously remodeled over time.
Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts. First published in 1943, it was part of a growing academic response and challenge to Columbia University’s ‘Dunning School’ of historical interpretation that originated in the late 19th century. This ‘school’ dominated scholarly discourse on Reconstruction and policies and laws in the Jim Crow South well into the 1930s. The Dunning school defended racist laws that oppressed African Americans using arguments based on ‘scientific racism’ then popular in the late 19thcentury. For more on ‘scientific racism’ see Stephen Gould’s excellent book Mismeasure of Man.
Douglas Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802. An excellent account of the attempted rebellion by a Gabriel in Henrico County and its aftermath.
Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo. From Hurston’s 1927 interview of Oluale Kossala, the last survivor of the Clotilda, the last documented slave ship to carry captive Africans to American shores in 1860. The book is a fascinating retelling of Kossala’s life in Africa before his harrowing capture and transport to the U.S., his subsequent enslavement (renamed Cudjo Lewis) and life after emancipation. Of note, the remains of the Clotilda were discovered in 2019.
The Slave Classic Slave Narratives: The life of Olaudah Equiano, The History of Mary Prince, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains or the Life of an American Slave. Excellent first-person narrative. The story of Chales Ball is extraordinary. A truly epic account of loss and resilience and hope. An American version of the Iliad.
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Heminges of Monticello: An American Family. A superb recounting of the Heminges family history while enslaved by Thomas Jefferson. Flips the script of telling the story of slavery from the perspective of the enslaver to that of the enslaved taking center stage.
Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South. Explores the reasons why America’s revolutionary generation – the ones screaming loudly about being slaves of the English and all the enlightenment language on equality – did not abolish slavery, but expanded it under their watch in the early Republic.
Tiya Miles, All that She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake. A beautifully written cultural history of a canvas sack and its contents given to a daughter by her mother after her child was sold. The canvas bag survived the vagaries of time. If you read one book from this list, this is it.
Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life in the Antebellum Slave Market. It’s a story of the slave showrooms in New Orleans, how being on the sale block was negotiated from the perspective of the enslaved and the slave holder. Excellent read.
Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life, and Michel Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slave in the Old South. Two excellent studies on America’s domestic slave trade which developed after the constitutional ban on the importation of slaves after 1807. This ban, in conjunction with America’s Westward movement, sparked a massive internal slave trade from Virginia and North Carolina to the ‘deep south.’
Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772 – 1832. This is the story of those enslaved African Americans that fought with the British to gain their freedom.
Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War. A story of northern complicity in perpetuating slavery for Wall Street profit. How New York City cops, courts, lawyers, judges, and politicians conspired with southern slave owners and slave catchers to kidnap free blacks and capture runaway slaves and send them South.
David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification. The author cogently and convincingly argues that “slavery was as important to the making of the Constitution as the Constitution was to the survival of slavery.” While one won’t ever find the word ‘slave’ or ‘slavery’ in the constitution, there are at least 11 clauses that directly or indirectly concern slavery.
M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima. A provocative book that explores the legacy of slavery and racial subservience in America’s consumer revolution in the late 19th century. You won’t walk down the aisles of a supermarket or watch a commercial on TV or streaming the same way after reading this book.
As we careen wildly and OUT OF CONTROL towards an authoritarian government, reading will become an act of resistance. Please share this list with your friends and family.
