Newspapers in the post-Reconstruction South disseminated propaganda accusing Black voters of excessive public corruption. This paper analyzes new data showing that propaganda influenced election outcomes by weakening biracial political coalitions that challenged the Democratic Party immediately...

This Article uncovers a lost history of property, showing the role that race and white supremacy played in the development of modern trespass law. Property law does not change in response to economic opportunities, evolving to ever-more efficiency. Instead, property law reflects political power....

This paper examines the long-term effect of a historical public crime, namely lynching, against Black offenders in the U.S. during the 19th and 20th centuries on thecurrent local rates of intergenerational mobility of Black people. I find that higherhistorical lynching activity exerts a negative...

Why did newly freed slaves and their descendants wait a half a century before migrating in large numbers to the superior economic opportunities in the North? Census lifetime migration data on both movers and stayers are examined intertemporally for both whites and blacks. Regression analysis...

The history of Black entrepreneurs from colonial times through most of the nineteenth century in the US whaling industry provides an excellent opportunity for insights into how free Blacks and those who freed themselves became entrepreneurs and how they influenced the abolition movement and...

We evaluate the empirical relevance of de facto vs. de jure determinants of political power in the U.S. South between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. We apply a variety of estimation techniques to a previously unexploited dataset on voter registration by...

We evaluate the empirical relevance of de facto vs. de jure determinants of political power in the U.S. South between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. We apply a variety of estimation techniques to a previously unexploited dataset on voter registration by...

Improvements in educational attainment and in educational quality are universally acknowledged to be major contributors to Black economic progress in the Twentieth Century. The sources of these improvements are less well understood. Many scholars implicitly assume improvements in schooling...

Williams (2022) ties the political participation of Blacks to historical lynchings that occurred in the United States. Her findings document lower Black voter registration rates in southern counties with greater number of historical lynchings. We show that this effect is driven by four outlier...

Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the U.S. financial system became more inclusive but subtle forms of financial discrimination remained, though they were difficult to prove statistically. Instead of reducing the residue of recalcitrant discrimination, regulators in the...