Announcing the Spring 2022 Issue of HISTORY NOW: The Honored Dead: African American Cemeteries, Graveyards, and Burial Grounds

The Gilder Lehrman Institute is pleased to announce the publication of the Spring 2022 issue of History Now, The Honored Dead: African American Cemeteries, Graveyards, and Burial Grounds.

Commemorating the lives of African Americans from the colonial era through the twentieth century, this issue of History Now explores the burial sites of people both enslaved and free, military and civilian, anonymous and renowned. Studying these historic burial grounds is a powerful way to foreground the Black experience in the story of the nation’s past.

The following five essays are featured in the issue:

• “The New York African Burial Ground” by Edna Greene Medford, Professor of History and Associate Provost at Howard University
• “African American Burial Sites in New England from Colonial Times through the Early Twentieth Century” by Glenn A. Knoblock, historian and author of African American Historic Burial Grounds and Gravesites of New England (2015)
• “Our National Cemetery and Its Honored Dead: The African American History of Arlington” by Ric Murphy, historian and co-author, with Timothy Stephens, of Section 27 and Freedman’s Village in Arlington National Cemetery: The African American History of America’s Most Hallowed Ground (2020)
• “Memorializing the Gravesites of Twentieth-Century African Americans” by Karla F. C. Holloway, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Duke University
• “‘What We Leave the Earth’: The African Burial Ground in New York City” by David Mills, poet, educator, and author of Boneyarn (2021), a series of poems inspired by Manhattan’s African Burial Ground

The issue also offers supplementary materials from the Gilder Lehrman archives, including previously published History Now essays, videos, and spotlighted primary sources. The issue’s special feature is a compelling short YouTube video about the 2020 book Section 27 and Freedman’s Village in Arlington National Cemetery: The African American History of America’s Most Hallowed Ground, co-authored by Issue 62 contributor Ric Murphy.

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