We sometimes imagine that such oppressive laws were put quickly into full force by greedy landowners. But that's not the way slavery was established in colonial America. It happened gradually -- one ...

Indentured servants first arrived in America in the decade following the settlement of Jamestown by the Virginia Company in 1607. The idea of indentured servitude was born of a need for cheap labor.

“James Buchanan was not legally a slaveholder,” Matthew Pinsker told a Zoom audience late last month. Nor did Buchanan or his contemporaries consider him a slaveholder, he added. But was Buchanan, as ...

The penalty has remained on the books in more than a dozen states, even though it hasn’t been enforced since the Civil War. But next month, voters in Alabama, Louisiana, Vermont, Oregon and Tennessee ...

Voters in five states on Tuesday were asked whether to update their states’ constitutions to remove slavery and indentured servitude as potential punishments. Although the 13th Amendment to the US ...

Abraham Lincoln argued Nance Legins-Costley's case before the Illinois Supreme Court. Indentured servitude, the equivalency of slavery, was allowed in Illinois. Legins-Costley lived for many years in ...

Less than a dozen years after the founding of Jamestown, about 20 Africans from what is now Angola were sold to settlers of the fledgling colony. They found themselves in a raw, chaotic frontier ...

It seems as if the history of Blackface isn’t the only history that embattled Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam struggles with. In an interview with CBS This Morning host Gayle King that is set to air on ...

Come November 8, Vermont residents will have the opportunity to amend their state constitution and abolish slavery and indentured servitude for good. To be clear, Vermont does not currently allow ...

Slavery as people usually think of it ended with the Civil War, right? But there are still states that allow slavery and indentured servitude as punishments for a crime. Five states asked voters to ...

NWIG: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, Vol. 91, No. 1/2 (2017), pp. 30-55 (26 pages) Seventeenth-century reports of the suffering of European indentured servants and the fact that ...