But there is a hack to prevent that panic, and it is called history. “The single greatest constant of history,” the historian and futurist Yuval Noah Harari writes in “Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow,” “is that everything changes.” History is indeed our best accumulated record of change, and of how our species has borne up to the shocks. It is a record replete with flood, famine, disease, exile, resource depletion, abuse and war. But it is also a golden repository of thought and action, a specieswide playbook for resiliency, recuperation, and even reinvention in response to societal disruption, moral failure and collapse.Take, for example, the last time in United States history when raw and unabashed tyranny reigned: the nearly 250 years when the enslavement of human beings for profit and pleasure dominated the economy, politics and culture of the nation. For the four million people of African descent who lived enchained before the Civil War, tyranny, and a particular form of racial authoritarianism, were the frame, structure and substance of daily life. Most Black people in the mid-19th century lived in the agricultural Southeast, Deep South, and Southwest (and some in the West of present-day Oklahoma, California and Oregon) under the heels and whips of a legally enabled population of abusers seeking ever more profits at the expense of their fellow humans — including, too often, blood kin born as a result of sexual exploitation.I hope we can agree by now what manner of beast chattel slavery was — how vile, how evil, and how intimately interwoven it was into early American society. Back in the 19th century, most African Americans lived and toiled under the sway of slaveholder-tyrants. For these millions of enslaved African Americans, the turning of each new day must have felt like the end, as it presaged the near and palpable threat of hunger, torture, murder, rape and the loss of loved ones to sale and redistribution. But while some did lose their lives or their minds under these unbearable circumstances, for many Black people slavery was not the end, but rather, a series of changes in states of being, because of a lack of control over their futures.The capacity to recognize those moments of emergency, catastrophe and impending loss as moments of change and then to anticipate what might come next are part of the psychological and emotional tool kit that saved Black America. It was illustrated powerfully by a single mother named Rose, enslaved in Charleston, S.C. in the early 1850s, who found herself contending with what must have felt like the end when her daughter, a girl of only 9, was about to be taken from her. That daughter, named Ashley — perhaps for the river that flowed near their homeplace — was slated for sale following the death of the man who had “owned” them both. Rose could have shrunk into herself from the horror of it; she could have frozen in the face of existential threat. Instead, Rose willed herself to take an action that might not stop the coming change, but would better equip her child to bear it. In so doing, Rose would gouge one more discernible crack in the wall of American slavery and the ideology of Black inhumanity.The historical record tells us that Rose did not look down in shame or away in a refusal to accept her reality. She instead looked up into the change of her terrifying circumstances and met the eyes of her daughter with an insistence on hope. Although Rose knew she was losing Ashley, perhaps forever, she hoped her child would survive this change and packed a sack of essential things to make it so. According to the story passed down by a line of women in their family, that sack held food, clothing, a braid and a mother’s eternal love.