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The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories.

Clint Smith who is both an educator and a poet traveled to various institution around the country while he was studying for his doctorate. His goal was to examine how different places presented the history of enslaved people.

He found a very mixed bag but his insights on each place was intriguing and well thought out. Smith's writing is exceptional and makes an interesting telling of a nonfiction book.

It is an important work because we are in the midst of a push-back on how American history is taught and some advocate for history education to be more nostalgia, as Smith says in his book than what actually happened.


“I think that history is the story of the past, using all the available facts, and that nostalgia is a fantasy about the past using no facts, and somewhere in between is memory, which is kind of this blend of history and a little bit of emotion…I mean, history is kind of about what you need to know…but nostalgia is what you want to hear.�

I highly recommend this book.