Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/26/opinion/abolitionist-or-terrorist.html and text if you can't access it:

ON Feb. 14, a group of activists in Charleston, S.C., unveiled a life-size statue of Denmark Vesey, a black abolitionist who was executed in 1822 for leading a failed slave rebellion in the city.

For many people, Vesey was a freedom fighter and a proto-civil rights leader. But the statue, the work of nearly two decades, brought out furious counterattacks; one recent critic called him a “terrorist,” and a historian denounced him as “a man determined to create mayhem.”

Radio hosts, academics and newspaper bloggers condemned the project as “Charleston’s parallel to the 1990s O. J. Simpson verdict,” and suggested other African-Americans they believed more appropriate subjects of memorialization, like the rock pioneer Chubby Checker or the astronaut Ronald E. McNair.

There’s no doubt that Vesey was a violent man, who planned to attack and kill Charleston whites. But those who condemn him as a terrorist merely demonstrate how little we, as a culture, understand about slavery, and what it forced the men and women it ensnared to do.

Vesey was as complicated a figure as the world that produced him. He was born around 1767, probably on the island of St. Thomas. As a child he was purchased as a cabin boy by Joseph Vesey, a Charleston-based slaver, who settled in the city just after the Revolution.

In 1799, the huge, bright, domestic slave won $1,500 in a city lottery and used $600 of that money to purchase his freedom. But his wife’s master evidently refused to sell her to him, and Charleston whites continued to own her and many of his children.

By early 1822, Vesey had begun to develop a plan for city slaves to rise up. On July 14, they would slay their masters as they slept, fight their way toward the docks and hoist sail for the black republic of Haiti, where slaves had successfully overthrown the French colonists two decades earlier.

Vesey had not lived through the horrors of slavery in the Caribbean and South Carolina by turning the other cheek. With a tough-minded brutality that shocks modern critics of the statue, he worried little about the civilians who might fall as the rebelling slaves worked their way to the docks. While discussing the men who owned his wife and family with his fellow plotters, Vesey picked up a large snake in his path and crushed it with one hand. “That’s the way we would do them,” he said calmly.

When the plot was foiled and Vesey and his co-conspirators captured, white Charleston erupted in anger. During his trial in June 1822, the justices charged him with “a diabolical plot” designed to instigate “blood, outrage, rapine, and conflagration.” Outside the castle-like structure, black women sang and prayed as city authorities sentenced Vesey and 34 of his followers to hang.

The complexity of Vesey’s story is hard to grasp, and wrestling with slavery and violence is hardly unique to South Carolina; white Southerners may rightly wonder when Manhattan will erect a statue to the slave Caesar Varick, who was burned alive in 1741 for plotting a revolt similar to Vesey’s.

More than a decade ago, while I was giving a talk on Vesey in Charleston, a member of the audience challenged my view that what Vesey wished to accomplish — the freedom for his friends and family — could be a good thing, on the grounds that he went about it the wrong way. “Why not work within the system for liberation,” the man asked, or even “stage a protest march?”

Although well intentioned, such questions reveal how far American society still has to travel before we reach a sophisticated understanding of the past. There was no “system” for Vesey to work within; his state had flatly banned private manumissions, or the freeing of slaves, in 1820. The only path to freedom was to sharpen a sword. Americans today can admire the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his 1963 nonviolent March on Washington, but his world was not Vesey’s, and we must understand that.

It is ironic that such historical myopia should be found in Charleston, which today bills itself as one of the nation’s most historic cities. Each afternoon horse-drawn carriages transport tourists about its narrow streets. But as the fight over the Vesey statue suggests, tour guides tell at best an incomplete story.

They often ignore, for example, the fact that of the roughly 400,000 Africans sold into what is now the United States, approximately 40 percent landed on Sullivan’s Island, a hellish Ellis Island of sorts just outside of Charleston Harbor. Today nothing commemorates that ugly fact but a simple bench, established by the author Toni Morrison using private funds.

Critics of the Vesey statue may not care for his methods (even though their city bristles with monuments and statues of men who picked up a gun to fight for slavery in 1861). But they need to acknowledge that his views were shaped by the whip. Upon being told that he was going to hang, Vesey allegedly whispered that “the work of insurrection would go on.” When it comes to facing up to unhappy truths about our history, he was more right than he knew.

Here is the comic entitled "Wales Through the Ages".

A general walkthrough would be nice, but I am particularly interested in frames 4 and 9 wherein the ball representing Wales seems to get a new identity (or at least a new flag). I am an American and have not studied Welsh history, so please bear with my ignorance.

Previous Weeks

This weekly feature is a place to discuss new developments in fields of history and archaeology. This can be newly discovered documents and archaeological sites, recent publications, documents that have just become publicly available through digitization or the opening of archives, and new theories and interpretations.

So, what's new this week?

I'm reading Incidents in the life of a slave girl, and in it, the author mentions reading the evening paper every day to see if anyone from the South has arrived to look for her:

I kept close watch of the newspapers for arrivals; but one Saturday night, being much occupied, I forgot to examine the Evening Express as usual. I went down into the parlor for it, early in the morning, and found the boy about to kindle a fire with it. I took it from him and examined the list of arrivals. Reader, if you have never been a slave, you cannot imagine the acute sensation of suffering at my heart, when I read the names of Mr. and Mrs. Dodge, at a hotel in Courtland Street.

When did the practise begin, and when did it end?

Edit: The city the author talks about is New York.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/calif-couple-strike-10-million-gold-coin-bonanza-22667087