<p><span class="deck">It was the nation’s biggest business, it was as well-organized as a Detroit assembly line, and it was here to stay. It was slavery. David Brion Davis, a lifelong student of the institution, tells how he discovered—and then set about teaching—its vast significance.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Without the material support of a half-dozen prominent northerners known as the Secret Six, John Brown’s attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry 150 years ago may well have never occurred.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">At five critical junctures in American history, major political compromises have proved that little of lasting consequence can occur if the entrenched sides don't make serious concessions.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Over the question of whether Missouri should be admitted to the Union as a free or slave state in 1820, creative moderates brokered an ingenious compromise that averted civil war.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Fistfights broke out in Congress in 1850 over whether the territories just won in the Mexican War should be slave or free—and only a last-minute series of compromises prevented catastrophe.</span></p>
<p>The famous photographs at Harvard, first published in <em>American Heritage</em> in 1977, are at the center of a difficult debate over who owns the images.</p>
<p>While the Underground Railroad helped enslaved black people escape north, another version ran in reverse, sending free men, women, and children back into bondage. </p>
<p>Chief Justice Roger Taney made his contribution to the ideology of white supremacy when he asserted that blacks were a people apart, beyond the promise of the<em> Declaration</em> and the guarantees of the <em>Constitution</em>.</p>
<p>As he later recounted in his memoirs, Frederick Douglass endured daily beatings and forced labor before taking his chances on the road to freedom.</p>
