BBC History Magazine
From sexual orgies to satan incarnated as a snake, lurid depictions of ‘voodoo’ in north america long titillated and shocked readers. as david g cox explains, they were also wielded as justifications for racist oppression during the social and political upheavals of the 19th-century us
On 2 January 1893, the black American abolitionist and reformer Frederick Douglass delivered a lecture on Haiti to an audience in Chicago. It was widely alleged, he reflected, that the Caribbean repub