In her review for the New York Times of AHA member Martha S. Jones’ (Johns Hopkins Univ.) new memoir, The Trouble of Color, AHA member Kerri K. Greenidge (Tufts Univ.) quoted past president Thavolia Glymph’s (Duke Univ.) presidential address from the 2025 AHA annual meeting. Glymph’s address, titled “Paper Tracings in the Spectacularly Boisterous Archive of Slavery,” speaks to the same theme as Jones’ memoir: both can be seen as a “rebuttal to those who still insist that enslaved peoples’ histories are unknowable.” Glymph said, “The archive of slavery is not a black hole. The desires of slaveholders are not of such density and gravity that the voices of enslaved people cannot be heard.”
