Writing to John Wayles Eppes in 1820, Thomas Jefferson spoke about about the exploitation of those he enslaved, especially in relation to the profits that he acquired off of the backs of their labor. He told Eppes, “I know no error more consuming to an estate that that of stocking…

In his documentary, Lillian Smith: Breaking the Silence, Hal Jacobs uses numerous historical clips. One that stood out to me, though, was a clip, which he showed three sections of, from a ten minute Coronet film entitled “The Plantation System in Southern Life” from 1950. The film presents the South…

For my “Monsters, Race, and Comics” class I’m teaching the first two volumes of Rodney Barnes and Jason Shawn Alexander’s Killadelphia. Recently, I spoke with Barnes about the series. We talked about the ways that the gothic works as both a “politically conservative” for and as a revolutionary form, the…

In my last post, I started looking at the differing perspectives we get of Jupiter’s history in Rodney Barnes and Jason Shawn Alexander’s Killadelphia. Specifically, I began to examine Jupiter’s description of his past in juxtaposition to the perspectives of Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson. After killing Blake Scott on…

This semester, in my “Monsters, Race, and Comics” course, I’m teaching the first two volumes of Rodney Barnes and Jason Shawn Alexander’s Killadelphia. Recently, I just reread both volumes, which contain the first 12 issues of the series. There is a lot within these issues that, combined with everything else…

With the release today of Milestone Generations, I wanted to take a moment and look at perhaps the best opening to any comic series: Hardware #1 (1993). in February 2021, Joseph Illidge posted the following about Hardware #1. He said, “One of the best first issues of a superhero comic…

Like a lot of the texts that I teach in my classes, I hadn’t read Ann Petry’s The Street before I assigned it a few semesters back in my Multicultural American Literature course. The only work, up to this point, that I had read from Petry was her short story…

In my previous post, I wrote about some of the pieces that I saw when visiting the Reckoning exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and the Afro-Atlantic Histories exhibit at the National Gallery of Art during our recent trip to Washington D.C. Today, I…

During our time in Washington D.C., we visited countless museums, and as usual, countless pieces of art impacted me, specifically at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and at the National Gallery of Art’s Afro-Atlantic Histories exhibit. Today, I want to highlight a few of the…