GLC Newsletter for August 16, 2021
GLC News and Events • Other Events • In the News • Announcements
GLC News and Events
Holly Lynton on Faith, Nature, and the Legacies of South Carolina Methodist Camp Meetings
Published Sunday, August 15, 2021
Restructure Lab: New Models for an Equitable Economy
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance,
and Abolition is a partner, along with Sheffield Political
Economy Research Institute (SPERI) at the University of Sheffield, UK
and Stanford University’s Center for Human Rights and
International Justice, on a project called Re:Structure Lab. Funded by
Humanity United and the Freedom Fund, the Re:Structure Lab brings
together leading academic experts, researchers, and real-world
practitioners working on forced labour and evidence-based
anti-trafficking policy. The Lab’s current project draws on recent
academic research across several disciplines to develop an ambitious
series of Forced Labour Evidence Briefs. Each will make recommendations
for how to restructure business models and supply chains to promote
equitable labour standards and protect workers from forced labour
and exploitation.
Visit the Re:Structure Lab project here
August 2, 2021
New Haven, Conn.— Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study
of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition today has announced the finalists
for the twenty-third annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, one of the
most coveted awards for the study of the African American experience.
Jointly sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and
Abolition at the MacMillan Center at Yale University, this annual prize
of $25,000 recognizes the best book written in English on slavery,
resistance, and/or abolition published in the preceding year.
The finalists are: Vincent Brown for Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press); Jessica Marie Johnson for Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press); and Marjoleine Kars for Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast (The New Press).
The Gilder Lehrman Center is pleased to announce the launch of
The Yale and Slavery Research Project website.
In announcing the establishment of the Yale and Slavery Working Group
on October 14, 2020, Yale University President Peter Salovey stated,
“To understand where we are today and to move forward as a community, we
must study the history of our university. As an American institution
that is 319 years old, Yale has a complex past that includes
associations, many of them formative, with individuals who actively
promoted slavery, anti-Black racism, and other forms of exploitation. We
have a responsibility to explore this history, including its most
difficult aspects; we cannot ignore our institution’s own ties to
slavery and racism, and we should take this opportunity to research,
understand, analyze, and communicate that history.”
The Yale and Slavery Working Group (YSWG) is focused on a deep
and thorough investigation of Yale’s historic involvement and
associations with slavery and its aftermath. The findings will help
build a clearer and more comprehensive history of Yale and contribute to
the scholarship on slavery and abolition more broadly.
The working group was organized in late 2020 and began intensive
research in 2021. Led by David Blight, Sterling Professor of History, of
African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the
Gilder Lehrman Center, the YSWG includes faculty, staff, librarians, and
New Haven community members, with administrative leadership from the
Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and
Abolition at the MacMillan Center.
Events and Resources
A Remembrance of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law Cazenovia Convention
Cazenovia Heritage organization
Saturday, Aug. 21, 2021 • 2:00 pm
Catherine Cummings Theatre, Cazenovia College
18 Lincklaen St., Cazenovia, NY
CAZENOVIA — On Saturday, Aug. 21, the newly incorporated Cazenovia
Heritage organization will present “A Remembrance of the 1850 Fugitive
Slave Law Cazenovia Convention,” beginning at 2 p.m. at Cazenovia
College’s Catherine Cummings Theatre at 18 Lincklaen St.
The commemoration will include a presentation by retired Madison County
Judge Hugh C. Humphreys, who has conducted extensive research on the
convention, followed by walking tours to five sites connected to the
historic event.
The Cazenovia Fugitive Slave Law Convention was held Aug. 21-22, 1850 in
opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law, which required federal marshals
to assist in the capture and return of escaped slaves, even in states
where slavery was forbidden. It also established significant fines and
penalties for people who helped escaped slaves, and it provided that
ordinary citizens could be pressed into service in support of the law.
further information
Dreaming of Timbuctoo - Panel Discussion
Led by Martha Swan, executive director of John Brown Lives! In collaboration with Rokeby Museum.
Sunday, August 22, 2021 • 4:00 pm
68 S Pleasant St., Middlebury, Vermont
free and open to the public • register here
“Dreaming of Timbuctoo,” a ground-breaking exhibit that unearths the
little-known story of black land ownership in Vermont, opening Aug. 22
and running through September and October at the Jackson Gallery
in Middlebury.
The “Dreaming of Timbuctoo” installation will be enhanced by several
events including lectures and play readings. The first event that
accompanies the exhibit opening will be a panel discussion led by Martha
Swan, executive director of John Brown Lives!. The
panel, which includes Lindsay Houpt-Varner, director of the Rokeby
Museum in Ferrisburgh, and Benita Law-Diao, a community and
environmental activist, begins at 4 p.m. and focuses on the black
experience in the region. This exhibit is sponsored by Middlebury
College and a Vermont Humanities grant.
#Slaveryarchive Book Club
Fall 2021
Check below the program of the second year of the #Slaveryarchive Book
Club convened by Ana Lucia Araujo (Howard University), Alex Gil
(Columbia University), Vanessa Holden (University of Kentucky),
and Jessica Marie Johnson (Johns Hopkins University).
You can register to attend any session of your choice on Zoom or watch it live on Youtube. See details below.
Wednesday, August 18, 2021 • 5:00 pm (EST): Museums and Atlantic Slavery (Routledge, 2021) by Ana Lucia Araujo (Howard University). To attend on Zoom, register HERE. USE CODE FLR40 to buy it with 20 % discount at the website of Routledge.
Wednesday, August 25, 2021 • 5:00 pm (EST): Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (W. W. Norton, 2021) by Kate Masur (Northwestern University). To attend on Zoom, register HERE.
Saturday, August 28, 2021 • 1:00 pm (EST): Free People of Color in the Spanish Atlantic: Race and Citizenship, 1780–1850 (Routledge, 2020) by Federica Morelli (University of Torino). To attend on Zoom, register HERE.
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In Conversation: Titus Kaphar and art collectors Arthur Lewis and Hau Nguyen
Yale Center for British Art
Friday, September 17, 2021 • 12:00 to 1:00 pm
Titus Kaphar (Yale MFA 2006), artist and cofounder of NXTHVN, in
conversation with the art collectors Arthur Lewis and Hau Nguyen;
moderated by Abigail Lamphier, Senior Curatorial Assistant in the
Department of Paintings and Sculpture at the Center
In the News
Britain’s Idyllic Country Houses Reveal a Darker History
Sam Knight, August 16, 2021, The New Yorker
Dyrham Park, an English country estate nestled among steep hills seven
miles north of Bath, fulfills your fantasy of what such a place should
be. A house and a dovecote were recorded on the site in 1311. The deer
park was enclosed during the reign of Henry VIII. The mansion that you
see today is a mostly Baroque creation: long, symmetrical façades,
looking east and west; terraces for taking the air; eighteenth-century
yew trees, an orangery, a church, fascinating staircases, a collection
of Dutch Masters. According to The Buildings of England: Gloucestershire, published
in 1970, Dyrham Park constitutes “the perfect setting; English country
house and church.” The house was a location for the movie of “The
Remains of the Day.”
On the second floor is the Balcony Room, which affords fine views of
the gardens. The room, once an intimate place to sit and drink tea or
coffee with visitors, is wood-panelled. It has exquisite brass door
locks. The fireplace holds a collection of seventeenth-century
delftware, above which hangs a museum-quality Dutch painting of
ornamental birds, by a court artist to William III. Facing into the
room, with their backs to the wall, are two statues of kneeling Black
men with rings around their necks.
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The next chapter of John Lewis’s legacy
Rebecca Burns, August 10, 2021, Atlanta Magazine
Back in 2013, the debut of a memoir in comic-book form by civil rights
figure and longtime Atlanta congressman John Lewis seemed an unlikely
format for a legendary activist with gravitas to spare. But Lewis’s March trilogy—co-authored
with aide Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell—proved to be a
juggernaut, landing on bestseller lists, securing a place
on high-school and college curricula, and ultimately earning a National
Book Award.
The March trilogy chronicles Lewis’s early life and involvement
in the civil rights movement, ending with the passage of the 1965
Voting Rights Act. Lewis had planned to continue the work, and before
the congressman’s death in July 2020, he and Aydin had drafted the
script for the Run series. The first volume of Run,
published in August by Abrams ComicArts, covers the tumultuous events of
1965-1966, including schisms between established civil rights leaders
and Black Power activists, the history-making election of Julian Bond to
the Georgia Legislature. Just in March, the book does not shy
away from unvarnished accounts of history. It opens with a fearsome
scene of Klan intimidation and closes with Lewis’s departure from the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
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The hidden history of Kansas is the story of enslaved people. Let’s say their names.
Max McCoy, August 15, 2021, Kansas Reflector
Shawnee Indian Mission is a bit of the 1850s frontier in the midst of
one of the richest suburban neighborhoods in the country. Just a block
away is the buzz of traffic on Shawnee Mission Parkway, and the homes in
the area cost more than most of us can afford. But for $5, Wednesday
through Saturday, you can visit the historic site with its three
original brick buildings and its 12 pastoral acres and imagine what life
might have been like for the missionaries, the Shawnee and Delaware
children who boarded at the school, and travelers on the Santa Fe
Trail, which ran just a few hundred yards north.
What you can’t do, unless you already know about them, is imagine what
life must have been like for the enslaved persons who helped build the
mission and were bound to Thomas Johnson, the Methodist preacher and
pro-slavery advocate who founded the school.
These enslaved persons aren’t mentioned in the 2015 video shown
to visitors. Only one of the interpretive displays mentions them. By one
account, it says, Johnson “owned at least six slaves at the
mission,” with perhaps another 10 who were children of the enslaved.
The display includes a reproduction of an 1856 bill of sale, from David
Burge to Johnson, at Westport, Missouri, of an enslaved girl named
Martha, of about 15 years, “sound in body and mind and a slave for
life.”
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Highways destroyed Black neighborhoods like mine. Can we undo the damage now?
Amy Stelly, August 13, 2021, The Washington Post
A favorite errand of mine when I was a child was to go to Joe Dave’s
meat market. Joe Dave had one hand full of fingers. The other was full
of nubs. He’d lost his fingers to either a cleaver or a bone saw, I’ve
forgotten which one. I just remember thinking that whatever he did must
have hurt. I would sit at his long butcher-block counter and watch
intently as he steadied the meat with his nubby hand and sliced very
carefully with the other. The only thing I didn’t like about Joe Dave’s
was the stench of raw meat. I can still smell that smell every time I
think of his market. It was a small price to pay to watch a master
at work, warmed by the sunlight pouring through his North Claiborne
Avenue storefront.
There were many masters on North Claiborne, and Black New Orleanians
were the beneficiaries of their talents. There were doctors, lawyers,
retailers, insurance agents, teachers, musicians, restaurateurs and
other small-business owners. The avenue stretched across the Tremé and
7th Ward neighborhoods, and in the Jim Crow era, it served as the social
and financial center of the Black community.
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Announcements
Assistant Professor, African American History or History of the African Diaspora
University of South Alabama, History
Deadline: September 13, 2021
The Department of History at the University of South Alabama invites
applications for a full- time (9-month), tenure-track assistant
professorship in African American History or History of the African
Diaspora, beginning August 15, 2022. Chronological period and
specialization are open. A PhD in History, African American Studies, or a
closely related field is preferred, but advanced ABD candidates will be
considered.
Assistant Professor - (Tenure Track) - African and Black Diaspora Studies
DePaul University, African and Black Diaspora Studies
Deadline: October 1, 2021
The Department of African and Black Diaspora Studies at DePaul
University invites applicants for a tenure-track appointment at the rank
of Assistant Professor beginning July 2022.
We seek applicants whose PhD and/or work fits into the humanistic
social sciences, including (but not limited to) Black/African Diaspora
Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, Anthropology, Environmental Studies,
Geography, and related areas of study. Ideally, candidates’ record
of teaching and research will demonstrate facility with
interdisciplinary approaches to the historical and contemporary
Black/African Diaspora.
Assistant Professor of African American History
Boston College, History
Deadline: 15 October 2021
The History Department at Boston College invites applications for a
tenure-track Assistant Professorship in African American History. The
area of specialization is open. Candidates should have received a Ph.D.
in history or related discipline by 31 August 2022.
Candidates should demonstrate an active research agenda and evidence
of excellence in teaching. The successful candidate will teach four
courses a year. These will be a mix of survey courses suitable for the
university undergraduate core curriculum, undergraduate electives, and
graduate courses.
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