Underground Railroad scholarship has focused almost exclusively on interior overland routes used to escape enslavement in the Antebellum South. Largely overlooked, however, is the great multitude of enslaved persons who made their way to freedom aboard merchant vessels plying coastal routes along the Atlantic seaboard. This crucial but neglected aspect of the Underground Railroad story […]

Join Porte Towne Magic for a celebration of African American music at 2:00. At 3:00 Greg Eatroff will discuss the role African-American soldiers and sailors played in the American Civil War, with particular emphasis on the role of “USCTs” in operations in and around Hampton Roads, from the Petersburg siege lines to the coastal fortifications […]

For many millennia, the Great Dismal Swamp was an important part of the Indigenous people’s landscape in the Mid-Atlantic region. With the settling of Jamestown and the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to the region in 1619, the swamp became a place of defiance, resistance, and a new start to life for potentially tens […]