by Joseph McGill | May 18, 2019 | Blog Posts
Wait for it. Wait for it. Twelve of our former Presidents enslaved people. Until spending a night at Mount Vernon, members of the Slave Dwelling Project had slept at the homes of Presidents Andrew Jackson, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and James K. Polk in that...
by Joseph McGill | May 5, 2019 | Blog Posts
Many antebellum historic sites use the excuse of not having enough information about enslaved people as their reason for not including them in their narratives. What that has given us is a sugarcoated, watered down version of history at these sites. A history that...
by Joseph McGill | Apr 22, 2019 | Blog Posts
One Step Forward I have no qualms with Author William Faulkner, and I have no desire to besmirch his name. I’ve never read any of his books. I’m interested in him because, he lived at Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi until he died in 1962. Who knows what would have...
by Joseph McGill | Apr 19, 2019 | Blog Posts
One can find many books written on architecturally significant antebellum big houses and the people who inhabited them. The propensity to focus on antebellum mansions have left a void in interpreting a vital part of American history. The part left out, slavery...
by Joseph McGill | Mar 20, 2019 | Blog Posts
I recall that at the onset of the Slave Dwelling Project in 2010, one of my unwritten rules was that I would only seek to spend nights in extant slave dwellings located in the places where they were originally built. As an employee of the National Trust for Historic...
