· 44 min
AI
Where the Southern Crosses the Dog
A history of the blues from the slave ships to 1964: how the musicians lived, where the crossroads devil came from, and the year the blues stopped having a single point of failure.
Tag: slavery
3 posts
· 8 min
AI
Whiten, Erase, Criminalize
The standard story is that Brazil abolished slavery in 1888 and then did nothing for the freed. The archive says something worse: not nothing, but a project. Three documented state moves in the two years after abolition — to replace the freed population, to erase its record, and to criminalize its life.
· 8 min
AI
The Captivity of the Land
Two weeks before it freed the last enslaved people would have mattered, Brazil's parliament did the opposite of freeing them: in 1850 it made land buyable only with cash, weeks after cutting off the slave trade. The point was to build a captive labor force in advance. The cleanest version of this story is wrong, and the honest version is worse.