Browse Items (48 total)

Minstrel shows in which white men appeared in blackface were popular in Vermont as well as other areas of the country. This photograph shows the "All- Star Minstrels," a group of 14 men on stage, twelve of them in blackface. Most of the men in…

Minstrel shows in which white men appeared in blackface were popular in Vermont as well as other areas of the country. This postcard shows a group of 14 men on stage, six of them in blackface. They appear to be a community-based, amateur production. …

In an article about the future of the University of Vermont, the editors of Vermont Life included a photograph of Kake Walk, an event in which students performed in blackface, calling it a "unique annual tradition." The article did not suggest that…

The history of Black people in Burlington during the late nineteenth century developed within the wider context of other local ethnic groups, but also should be understood on its own terms. At the same time, Afro-Burlingtonians shared many…

Black Vermonters were, by definition, oddballs -- a tiny minority who chose the country over the city. How did they fare in this rural environment? What sort of work did they find in Vermont's agrarian economy? Did they own farms or homes? Were they…

As in other states, the white majority delegated most Blacks to menial positions, reserving for Anglo-Saxon whites high status jobs and social privileges.

Guyette makes a case for looking at Vermont's history as it concerns the treatment of African Americans and how we need "to understand our real history and the 'culture-wide stampeded spirit' engendered by our myths that burden people of color."

Vermont's reputation as a bastion of antislavery and women's extensive involvement in antislavery societies elsewhere in the Northeast suggests that Jonathan Miller was not just boasting. But if so many women were involved, as Miller contended, why…

A nineteenth-century genealogist alleged that Prentiss, the young St. Albans amanuensis of Jeffrey Brace's 1810 memoir, The Blind African Slave, practiced law in Richmond, Virginia, and ran a plantation in Wheeling, West Virginia. Although this…

Recent scholarship has uncovered the lives of Black soldiers, farmers, landowners, voters, and taxpayers who were as much a part of the early history of this country and this state as the founders. John and Judith Lynde are not unique, and similar…

A remarkable set of resolutions that the student body of Bowdoin College in Maine passed in 1838 denounced the "unfounded and wicked prejudice" displayed against Andrew Harris at the University of Vermont "for possessing a complexion which God saw…

Andrew Harris was a man of constant activity and tremendous energies, all of which were devoted to what at the time was the truly radical cause of racial equality in America. His untimely death of fever in December 1841 at the age of 27 is the only…