Zora Neale Hurston used her anthropological training to interview a man who had survived the slave trade

Some Harlem Renaissance figures criticized Zora Neale Hurston's most famous novel when it was released

Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" is now considered one of the masterpieces of the Harlem Renaissance, though some in the movement criticized it when it was released in 1937. Both Alain Locke and the writer Richard Wright felt that Hurston's novel lacked depth. Wright was particularly harsh, writing that "her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought. In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy."

Zora Neale Hurston's 'Spunk' spent decades languishing in the Library of Congress

The author, known for her masterwork "Their Eyes Were Watching God," wrote the play in 1935, but it was mostly unknown. In 1997, it was re-discovered in the Library of Congress' drama collection, a repository for plays that were not copyrighted because they were never staged.

What was life like as a slave in the US?

Over 2,500 former slaves were interviewed by writers and journalists in the late 1930s as part of the US Federal Writer's Project. The collection recorded images and firsthand verbal accounts of life as a slave, eight of which are highlighted in this article at the Library of Congress. See the humanity in each of these individuals with their firsthand accounts.

Read 'The New Negro,' the influential collection edited by Alain Locke

The 1925 anthology features early works by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, WEB DuBois, and more. You can read it in its entirety—for free—through the Internet Archive.

After gaining her freedom, Truth successfully went to court to free her son

When her son Peter was illegally sold into slavery in Alabama, Truth took the matter to court—becoming one of the first Black women to successfully sue a white man and win, and securing her son's return.

Whitman's view on slavery was informed by a trip to New Orleans

In 1848, Walt Whitman traveled with his brother to New Orleans to pursue a job opportunity at the Daily Crescent newspaper. While there, he witnessed firsthand the horrors of the slave trade, an experience that would inform the political and artistic projects that followed.

The history behind the country's first Black-owned bookstore

In 1834, the first Black-owned book store was opened in New York City by abolitionist David Ruggles. Ruggles founded an antislavery newspaper and was an organizer for what eventually became the Underground Railroad. His bookstore was dedicated to abolitionist literature but was also a meeting place and lending library for Black people, including those who had escaped slavery.

Trans-Atlantic and intra-American slavery: a visual database

This interactive database provides insight into the trading of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. This database offers maps, articles, timelapses, videos of 3D slave ship models, and searchable databases on enslavers and the enslaved. According...

Hear the stories of Black congressmen who served during Reconstruction

This podcast explores the Black congressmen of the 1870s, like Hiram R. Revels and Joseph Rainey, many of whom were born into slavery and symbolized the hope of a more racially equal post-Civil War America.

The southbound Underground Railroad: finding freedom in Mexico

Until recently, the southbound Underground Railroad, as some scholars call it, has been largely overlooked, mainly because it left so few traces in surviving records. Read this article to learn more about this dangerous path and its travelers.

Native voices share their histories along the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail

Tribal historians recount their peoples' histories and perspectives on the Lewis and Clark expedition, offering an Indigenous narrative of the lands, encounters, and legacies that shaped the journey.

The 13th Amendment's criminal exception enabled new forms of forced labor

Southern states exploited the amendment's clause allowing slavery "as punishment for crime" to arrest thousands of Black Americans on minor charges, leasing them to private employers through convict labor systems that persisted for decades.

A story of upward mobility

What role did the neighborhood you grew up in have in shaping your economic opportunities? Author Aaron Williams tells a data story about migration, community, and returning to your roots.

O’Connor’s caretaker Emma Jackson had an early impact on her views

Flannery O'Connor had conflicting views on race. She criticized racism and mocked segregationists, yet made racist jokes. Scholars recently unearthed details from the O’Connor archive about Emma Jackson, a Black woman hired young Flannery's caretaker. O'Connor recounted learning about racism after being scolded for spending too much time with Jackson.

Watch a 1934 short film starring jazz legend Cab Calloway, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance's music scene

Archaeologists race to record ancient Nubia

Long ignored by white archaeologists as a mere footnote, modern scientists are now racing to document what’s left of the African civilization. Evidence of ancient Nubia is at risk of vanishing under environmental, societal, and political pressures. This Undark Magazine article walks you through archaeologists' fight to record ancient Nubia.

The poem behind 'Strange Fruit'

"Bitter Fruit" was written by Abel Meeropol, a teacher, under the pseudonym Lewis Allen, after seeing a photograph of a lynching. Eventually, he set the words to music, and the song was then performed by his wife and other singers. In 1938, he played it for Holiday, who began performing it at the New York's Cafe Society. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

New Orleans' Congo Square birthed what would become jazz

The city's enslaved people congregated in the city square on Sundays, bringing together the musical traditions of their disparate cultures through drum circles, communal dancing, and call-and-response singing. The rhythmic style that evolved in the area would eventually give rise to ragtime and, subsequently, jazz.

Did a Smithsonian anthropologist steal people's brains?

This comic examines "racial brain collection" of Ales Hrdlicka, the Smithsonian's head of physical anthropology during the early 1900s. Hrdlicka was a white supremacist who sought physical evidence for his theories on anatomical differences between...

Why Percival Everett decided to reimagine 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'

Percival Everett's novel "James"—a retelling of Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Jim, an escaped slave—was one of the most acclaimed books of 2024. In this interview, Everett explains why he decided to rework the classic American novel and why he felt it was necessary to infuse his own with a different voice.

​​Augusta Savage's sculptures emphasized realistic Black figures

The artist became known for her realistic busts of prominent Black figures, like WEB DuBois and Marcus Garvey, which emphasized their natural features, a stark contrast to stereotypical depictions of Black people in popular culture. Below is "Gamin," Savage's 1929 sculpture of her nephew.

A letter about a hurricane helped launch Hamilton's life in America

After a hurricane severely damaged the Caribbean island of St. Croix, Alexander Hamilton wrote a vivid letter that was later published and impressed local business leaders, who took up a collection to send the teenager to North America for schooling.

Novelist Charles Portis covered Elvis Presley as a young reporter

The "True Grit" and "Norwood" author spent time working as a reporter for Memphis newspaper The Commercial Appeal, where he covered Elvis Presley's brief military leave.

Where did zombies come from?

This 17-minute video dives into the origin of modern-day zombies. Zombies can be traced to early West African spiritual practices, specifically Vodou. Vodou evolved from the mixture of beliefs held by enslaved Africans in the French colony of...

A lost Jack Kerouac story was discovered in the belongings of a gunned-down mob boss

The unpublished "The Holy, Beat, and Crazy Next Thing" was found in the belongings of Paul Castellano, who was murdered in 1985. It's unclear why Castellano had it, though an heir says it was originally in the collection of a "noted San Francisco-based poet...who received it directly from the author."

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

'The Vulture and the Little Girl' (1993) has a controversial story behind it

The tragic Pulitzer Prize-winning image taken by South African photojournalist Kevin Carter depicts a little girl suffering from starvation during a famine in Sudan in 1993. Carter faced criticism from the public for taking her picture instead of helping her. A few months later, Carter took his own life.

How the most famous Ebola book, The Hot Zone, which sold 3.5 million copies and was translated into 30 languages, got aspects of the disease so wrong.

The American cockroach is actually from Africa, an apparent hitchhiker aboard ships carrying enslaved people, with evidence suggesting the bug may have arrived in the New World as early as the 1600s.

The first line of 'immortal' human cells, which can divide indefinitely and are used in scientific research, was nonconsensually taken from a Black woman.

American short story writer Flannery O'Connor raised 40 peacocks, which became potent symbols for her fiction's elegant violence

The story of Dollree Mapp, whose legal challenge over her 1957 conviction for possessing "obscene material" led to a major strengthening of the Fourth Amendment

One of the most famous portraits ever taken is 'Afghan Girl' (1984) by Steve McCurry, yet the subject Sharbat Gula went much of her life without being identified or benefitting from the image's success.

Quincy Jones' 'Big Band Bossa Nova' helped introduce bossa nova—a jazz-influenced Brazilian genre—to the US

The first robot in literature may have been a 'mechanical man' in 1907's 'Ozma of Oz,' a book in L Frank Baum's 'Wizard of Oz' series.

In 2018, 26-year-old missionary John Allen Chau was killed by tribesmen after attempting to reach and evangelize on India's isolated North Sentinel Island

In 1915, workers recovered a submarine-like vessel from the Chicago River, prompting fears of German espionage

The United States has had a tumultuous relationship with Cuba since its 1959 revolution, highlighted by a nuclear crisis and a decades-long trade embargo.

20,000 letters to the advice columnist 'Dear Abby' provide insight into prevailing sex, religion, and LGBTQ fears, anxieties, and concerns from the 1950s onward.

The Dracula character, now seen as the vampire archetype, was inspired by a seafood-induced nightmare its creator experienced.

Coral reefs get their colors from zooxanthellae—microorganisms that line corals' digestive tracts and provide them with sugars in exchange for a home within this protective tissue.

Explore a list of the 100 best novels of all time, compiled by some of the world's best living writers, including Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, and Jennifer Egan.

Many legends about George Washington, including his supposed wooden teeth and the story of cutting down the cherry tree, lack evidence.

The Brothers Grimm were lawyers before they were storytellers, but became interested in fairy tales as they began investigating how rules and customs had been passed down through cultures.

In 1939, baseball star Lou Gehrig delivered his inspirational 'Luckiest Man' speech after retiring due to the health condition that now bears his name.

The 19th-century painters of the Hudson River School were among the first American romantics, with portraits that displayed the natural beauty of the young country.

When you complete a CAPTCHA on a website to prove you are human, you may be unknowingly training algorithms for self-driving cars, whose systems require training data to help identify crosswalks, bicycles, and other outdoor objects.

Explore fun facts from the USPS, including unique post office buildings, a stamp that traveled past Pluto, and more.

Louisiana's 'Cancer Alley' is infamous for having some of the highest industrial pollution, toxic air emissions, and cancer risks in the US.

Hurricanes, which rely on air consistently spinning in the same direction, cannot cross the equator because air curves in opposite directions north and south of it.