January 1861

Cincinnati-based Robert S. Duncanson, the first internationally recognized Black American painter, built his reputation through the 1850s as a leading Hudson River School landscape artist. His 'Blue Hole, Little Miami River' (1851) and 'Land of the Lotus Eaters' (purchased by the King of Sweden) demonstrated that Black artistic excellence could reach the highest levels of the Western art world. He trained in Europe and exhibited widely in the 1850s.

One of the only slave narratives written by a woman lays bare the sexual exploitation at the heart of slavery — and seven years Jacobs spent hidden in a crawlspace to escape it.