Slavery

A jurist exiled for fourteen years after a foreign invasion still produced work specialists treat as the best surviving source on his field, proof of how portable book-based scholarship could be.

The priest who spent decades pleading against enslaving Native Americans initially told Spain to import Africans instead, then wrote in his own history that he had come to see that stance as equally unjust, a reversal historians rarely put beside his more famous advocacy.

A runaway printer's apprentice became the one man to sign the Declaration, the peace treaty with Britain, and the Constitution, having spent decades as a slaveholder before turning into a public abolitionist.

A young officer's ambush of a French detachment helped start a world war, and the general it made famous later gave up power twice, on his own terms, which is rarer than the story usually admits.

UNESCO calls it the largest slave trading centre on the African coast; researchers who counted the actual numbers put its share at under five per cent.

1865

The document most Americans picture being signed on the Fourth of July was mostly signed a month later, and the vote that mattered had already happened two days earlier.

1787

1804

Most of the juntas that started this began by insisting they were still loyal to the Spanish king, which makes it hard to say exactly when a movement to preserve the monarchy became a war to end it.

Twelve million people loaded onto ships across four centuries, in a trade historians still argue over calling a partnership rather than simply naming who held the power in it.

The man who wrote that all men are created equal held more than six hundred people as property, and for two centuries historians were reluctant to say plainly what that meant for one enslaved family in particular.

A man freed from slavery years before the revolution that made him famous led the only successful slave uprising to found a state, then died in a French mountain prison denied medical care because of his colour.