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Jennifer Howard

Writer, editor, journalist.

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“Documents Hold a Rare Wealth of Information About Civil War-Era Slaves in the Nation’s Capital”

April 10, 2012

They were domestics and carpenters and metal workers, husbands and wives and children–about 3,200 people enslaved in the nation's capital when the Civil War broke out. On April 16, 1862, eight and a half months before the Emancipation Proclamation, they were freed by Congress through the D.C. Compensated Emancipation Act.It was the first time the federal government set slaves at liberty. Now rare details of those lives are emerging, as scholars transcribe and study the petitions filed by slave owners seeking compensation under the 1862 law. "It's the largest set of information about any one group of slaves in American history that I know of," says Kenneth J. Winkle, a professor of American history at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. "People, including me, will be working with this information for years."[Personal note: As I will obnoxiously remind people from time to time, I grew up in DC, so I'm especially glad to have gotten a chance to do this story.]

Recent Writing

  • “A paler shade of white”: HAVING AND BEING HAD by Eula Biss (review)
  • “Do We Have Victorians to Thank for Consumerism?”
  • “The Complicated Role of the Modern Public Library”

Recent Posts

  • Book event: VA Festival of the Book “Shelf Life”
  • Interview: “Rising Up With Sonali”
  • Live at East City Bookshop

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About Jen

Jen Howard sitting in front of a brick wall. She is smiling.

Writer, journalist, editor, gadabout. Book- and nature lover. Washingtonian. LLC. Read more ยป

Latest Posts

  • Book event: VA Festival of the Book “Shelf Life”
  • Interview: “Rising Up With Sonali”
  • Live at East City Bookshop
  • The TLS: “Coming Clean” (review)
  • Vox: Quoted in an article on “The New Maximalism”

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