The Black Seminole Slave Rebellion

Imagine that the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history had gone unrecognized for more than a century and a half, even by the country's leading scholars. Imagine further that the rebellion was not some obscure event in a rural backwater, but a series of mass escapes that took place in conjunction with the largest Indian war in U.S. history and that resulted in a massive, well-documented destruction of personal property. How could scholars forget such an event? And what would such an oversight say about the country? A country that had robbed generations of the story of its most successful black freedom fighters. A country that had taught its children a lie, that over the first American century, only white men fought for freedom and won.

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Meet Sada Mire: the First Somali Archeologist known to the World

Somalia sits on the horn of Africa with the longest coastline on the continent’s mainland, while its capital city Mogadishu is known as the ‘white pearl’ of the Indian Ocean. In antiquity, Somalia is said to be “among the most probable locations of the fabled ancient Land of Punt;” in addition, it was an important commercial centre with ancient relations. Its long-distance trade by sea and camel caravan gave birth to a multi-cultural society with communities on the coast.

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Grim History Traced in Sunken Slave Ship Found Off South Africa

WASHINGTON — On Dec. 3, 1794, a Portuguese slave ship left Mozambique, on the east coast of Africa, for what was to be a 7,000-mile voyage to Maranhão, Brazil, and the sugar plantations that awaited its cargo of black men and women. Shackled in the ship’s hold were between 400 and 500 slaves, pressed flesh to flesh with their backs on the floor. With the exception of daily breaks to exercise, the slaves were to spend the bulk of the estimated four-month journey from the Indian Ocean across the vast South Atlantic in the dark of the hold.

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What, to the American Slave, Is Your 4th of July?’

Frederick Douglass “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” asked Frederick Douglass of the crowd gathered at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, N.Y., on July 5, 1852. “I answer,” he continued, “a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which lie is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham.”

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