Ep. 153: I’ve been to New Orleans a number of times. It’s a really cool city. If you ever get a chance to go, you totally should. On my most recent trip, we took a walking tour of the French Quarter and one of the stops was, of course, Jackson Square. Jackson Square is the heart of the French Quarter which is the historic district of New Orleans. It’s dominated by the St. Louis Cathedral directly in the middle with the Cabildo, the former seat of the Spanish colonial government, and the

Ep. 152: Since the times of slavery, most historians have gotten at least one thing very very wrong. Historians long proposed that white women in the United States were simply passive enslavers. That they enslaved people because their husbands enslaved people. They pointed to legal structures at the time that prevented married women from owning property. Sure, white women managed enslaved people because they ruled over the domestic sphere as housekeepers. But, for far too long, historians cast a

Ep. 151: In 1861 a book was published. This book, titled “Incidents of the Life of a Slave Girl” told an unbelievable story, the story of an enslaved Black girl who went to great lengths to avoid sexual abuse by her enslaver. A girl who cunningly twisted this very system of abuse to work in her favor. A girl who, now a woman, spent seven years lying in a tiny crawl space above her grandmother’s porch, watching her own children play through a peephole she had whittled in the wood. A woman who