Path of 1831 annular solar eclipse seen by Nat Turner. NASA, collection of Michael Zeiler. Since ancient times we’ve viewed solar eclipses with foreboding. But they don’t affect our lives, do they? The most significant solar eclipse in American history happened in 1831. What made it important was a man who saw it. Nat Turner, […]
Just hours after I posted “The Legend of Jim Crow” last week, nine black people were shot to death at a prayer meeting in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The Jim Crow stereotype is a laughing, simple, guileless “darkie.” I said I’d write about the stereotype of Nat Turner this […]
“Jim Crow” is clothed in ambiguity and irony. I first came across the term in a University of Virginia class. On the syllabus was C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow, a series of lectures at the University published in 1955. It’s likely there was a real, historical Jim Crow, an African American, […]