Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Manisha Sinha

Manisha Sinha, the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut, is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, and The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860–1900, which will be published next year. (April 2023)

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The Beautiful Struggle

Several scholars have been recovering the lives and ideas of antebellum Black activists by studying their involvement in early Black newspapers and conventions.

Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship

by Christopher James Bonner

The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States

by Derrick R. Spires

Educated for Freedom: The Incredible Story of Two Fugitive Schoolboys Who Grew Up to Change a Nation

by Anna Mae Duane

April 20, 2023 issue

The Case for a Third Reconstruction

The enduring lesson of American history is that the republic is always in danger when white supremacist sedition and violence escape justice.

February 3, 2021

The New Fugitive Slave Laws

Today, in criminalizing the provision of humanitarian assistance to migrants we have resurrected the fugitive slave laws of antebellum America. Just as abolitionist activists were once targeted, human rights activists have found themselves in the sights of the Trump administration for surveillance and prosecution.

July 17, 2019

Echoes of the Civil War

By the eve of the war, in 1861, most people in the northern free states felt that the democratic institutions of the country were being subverted. There are many Americans who feel the same way today.

March 6, 2018

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