The Classic

Recent News

• An excerpt from Toni Morrison’s The Origin of Others, considering the ways in which life and literature teach us to see others as different, was published by Prospect; meanwhile the Los Angeles Review of Books considered how Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, published 25 years ago, gave wider recognition to the emerging field of critical whiteness studies.
• Tera Hunter, author of Bound in Wedlock, talked with VIBE about the meaning(s) of marriage for African Americans both enslaved and free.
• The Huffington Post featured David Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory in a roundup of “Books That Will Help You Understand America.”
• Photographs from Scott Chimileski and Roberto Kolter’s Life at the Edge of Sight were featured in Harvard Magazine.

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August 18: Roger B. Taney, Slavery’s Great Chief Justice

Included among the Confederate statues whose removal has provided white supremacists with thin cover to parade hatred in the feeble guise of heritage have been several monuments to U.S. Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney. Most remembered for his painfully racist and staunchly proslavery opinion in 1857’s Dred Scott v. Sandford, Taney is one of three Supreme Court Justices whom legal scholar Paul Finkelman considers in his forthcoming Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court. Placing Taney alongside Chief Justice John Marshall and Associate Justice Joseph Story, Finkelman documents how this trio—whom he calls the most important Supreme Court Just…