A graduate student of mine alerted me to this brilliant YouTube series of short videos, Ask a Slave. (Don’t we get all the best ideas from our students? I sure do!) Ask a Slave, directed by comedian Jordan Black, is based on the real-life experiences of actress Azie Mira Dungey who worked as a “living history character” to portray an enslaved maid at Mount Vernon.

One of the things I think Lizzie May does very well is to suggest the ways in which white women were just as complicit in the creation and maintenance of slavery as white men. Be sure to see all five videos! (My favorite is Episode 2: Abolitioning, which very cleverly notes that slavery wasn’t the only thing keeping African Americans down in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.) Gawker calls Ask a Slave “the best Web series since Drunk History!” You be the judge!