Green’s Dictionary of Slang , launched in print in 2010 and available online since 2016, currently offers some 55,400 entries, in which are nested around 135,000 discrete words and phrases, underpinned by over 655,000 examples of use, known as citations. Thanks to the online environment, it has been possible to...

To gain insight into the connections between antebellum school mathematics, on the one hand, and the debates on how most speedily to abolish slavery, on the other, it is invaluable to research databases of antebellum publications. This includes, for instance, Readex’s Early American Newspapers , African American Newspapers , and...

Nineteenth-century African American newspapers attracted black writers, subscription agents, printers, and readers eager to imbibe news and opinions from their own heterogeneous, diverse communities. They considered the impact of American slavery on global trade and commerce and global appropriations of African American culture and ideas. They ranged from commercial publications...

Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (NYU Press, 2017) traces a forgotten history of black resistance to the ascendency of racial science in the nineteenth century. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, naturalists, medical doctors, comparative anatomists, and a variety of gentleman scientists became increasingly interested...

In the late 1890s, Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee Institute’s principal and a former slave, was one of the most recognized black men on the planet. His agenda for enabling jobs and education for post-Reconstruction black southerners also assuaged many white Americans’ anxieties about black economic competition and political empowerment. Another...