GLC Newsletter for April 5, 2022GLC News and Events • Other Events • In the News • AnnouncementsGLC News and EventsLegacies of Slavery: Past, Present & Future
Gilder Lehrman Center and the Council of Independent Colleges
April 5-7, 2022
register here 
Please join the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center at Yale and our colleagues at the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) on the afternoons of April 5–7 for a virtual symposium devoted to the Legacies of Slavery: Past, Present & Future. The opening panel features four of the country’s most important thinkers about the problems of slavery and race in the public culture of the United States: Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture; Edward Ayers, historian and president emeritus of the University of Richmond; Elizabeth Hinton, associate professor of history and African American studies at Yale University and a leading scholar on racial inequality, criminalization, and policing; and David Blight, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Frederick Douglass.
Opening Panel, Tuesday, April 5, 2022 • 7:00–8:30 p.m. EDT
The Bonn/Yale Anton Wilhelm Amo Fellowship 2022-2023
Deadline: April 15, 2022
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (GLC), part of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University, in partnership with the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS), proudly announce the Second Bonn/Yale Anton Wilhelm Amo Fellowship. The Bonn Center hosts the Cluster of Excellence “Beyond Slavery and Freedom. Asymmetric Dependencies in Pre-modern Societies,” funded by the German Excellence Strategy.
Named after the African scholar Anton Wilhelm Amo, this residential fellowship is based in Germany and is open to all scholars with expertise in racial slavery in the southern United States from the colonial period through the American Civil War. Applicants MUST have received the Ph.D. prior to the beginning of their appointment. Both established and younger scholars are encouraged to apply. Fellows are expected to spend the majority of their time in residence at Bonn, Germany, from October 2022 through September 2023. Deadline to apply is April 15, 2022. The fellowship is administered through the BCDSS and application materials must be sent to Bonn; details are below.
further information
Bonded: The Relationships Contemporary Slavery Makes and Why They Matter
GLC@Lunch with Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick
Wednesday, April 13, 2022 • 12:00 to 1:15 pm
Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick’s current book project, "Bonded," explores the relationship between slavery and freedom and between perpetrator and survivor. Drawing on unprecedented conversations with matched pairs of contemporary bonded laborers and landlords, it asks new questions about how human rights violations and emancipatory struggles are experienced, but also raises provocative and profound questions about the central role of the individual in our thinking about human progress and social change.
From Slavery to Eugenics: Confronting Legacies of Racism in Medicine and Across the Disciplines
Yale & Slavery Research Project Student Symposium
Wednesday, April 20, 2022 • 12:00 to 6:00 pm
Charting the Course of an Atlantic Slave War
Lecture by Vincent Brown
Thursday, April 21, 2022 • 12:00 to 1:30 pm
Vincent Brown is the Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Professor Brown is the co-winner of the 2021 Frederick Douglass Book Prize for Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020). Events and Resources Call for Post-Secondary History Educators to Discuss "Divisive Concepts" Challenges
American Historical Association
Tuesday, April 5, 2022 • 3:00 pm ET
register here
The American Historical Association (AHA) and the Gardner Institute want to create resources that might help teachers concerned about the tension between the professional integrity of US history instruction and the potential implications of these laws and regulations.
To do this, we need first to hear about the challenges history educators are experiencing in states where this kind of legislation exists or is being advanced, and in school districts where boards of education are establishing comparable restrictions. We invite you to register our upcoming discussion for post-secondary teachers and administrators.
The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation
Thavolia Glymph, Duke University
Tuesday, April 5, 2022 • 7:00 pm ET
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A comprehensive new history of women's roles and lives in the Civil War, Thavolia Glymph’s recent book, The Women’s Fight, shows how women—North and South, white and black, enslaved and free—were fully engaged in the wartime struggles on the home front, the military fight, and the political and moral battle to preserve the Union and end slavery. Glymph focuses on the ideas and ideologies that drove women's actions, allegiances, and politics. Join Professor Glymph for this virtual presentation and conversation as she discusses the ways women’s fight in the Civil War was a fight among and between women and with the men who sought to control how they could fight. Glymph shows how the Civil War exposed as never before the nation's fault lines, not just along race and class lines but also along the ragged boundaries of gender. Glymph makes clear that women's experiences were not new to the mid-nineteenth century; rather, many of them drew on memories of previous conflicts, like the American Revolution and the War of 1812, to make sense of the Civil War's disorder and death.
Elizabeth Alexander: The Trayvon Generation
The New York Public Library
Wednesday April 6, 2022 • 6:30 to 7:30 pm
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In the summer of 2020, following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, Elizabeth Alexander began turning a mother’s eye to her sons’ and students’ generation to reflect on the challenges facing young Black America. The Trayvon Generation, as she began referring to them, could not, even as children, be shielded from the brutality that has affected the lives of so many Black people. In her new book. Alexander weaves together those reflections with ruminations on groundbreaking works of art by some of our most extraordinary artists in order to ask how we reckon with who we are as a nation and how we move forward.
Slavery, Capitalism, and Empire (CBFS)
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
Thursday, April 7, 2022 • 6:30 to 8:00 pm EDT
A number of new books demonstrate how central the transatlantic slave trade and US imperialism were to the development of US capitalism. Join speakers Adom Getachew, Peter Hudson, Justene Edwards, and Daniel Immerwahr for a discussion of the political economy of race and resistance from the vantage points of the Caribbean, US and Africa.
The talk is part of the Schomburg Center's Conversations in Black Freedom Studies series organized by historians Jeanne Theoharis and Robyn C. Spencer.
Yale’s Portraits of Elihu Yale: New Light on the Group Portrait of Elihu Yale, His Family, and an Enslaved Child
New Haven Free Public Library
Tuesday, April 12, 2022 • 7:00 pm
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Courtney J. Martin, Paul Mellon Director, Yale Center for British Art, in conversation with Matthew Jacobson, co-director of the Public Humanities Program and the Sterling Professor of American Studies, History & African American Studies at Yale, with YCBA researchers Eric James, Abigail Lamphier, Lori Misura, David Thompson, and Edward Town.
This program is presented as part of the ongoing "Democracy in America" series, a collaboration between the New Haven Free Public Library and Public Humanities at Yale.
The Rise and Fall of Reconstruction
Dr. Henry Louis Gates
Center for Studying Structures of Race, Roanoke College
Tuesday, April 19, 2022 • 6:30 to 7:45 pm
register here
Join the Center for Studying Structures of Race and the Fowler Program for an evening with Dr. Henry Louis Gates. Dr. Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. is an American literary critic, professor, historian, filmmaker, and public intellectual who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
The Rev. James W.C. Pennington Lecture
Featuring Sarah Lewis, Harvard University, Author of The Rise
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 600 Main St, Hartford, CT
Thursday, April 21, 2022 • 5:00 pm Reception; 6:00 pm Lecture
In person or live stream
register here
When it comes to justice, Sarah Lewis knows the power that artists, visionaries and iconic images have on our society. Having served on President Barack Obama's Arts Policy Committee, and Guest-Editor of Aperture’s smash-hit “Vision & Justice” issue, Sarah zeroes in on the importance of photography, art and images as indicators of citizenship and catalysts of social change. In this empowering and timely talk, Sarah combines art history, race, American history, and technical innovation to paint a picture of cultural transformation and understanding. The road to true progressive change is often hard to communicate, but Sarah will show you the crucial nature of art for justice, and how progress can be seen through images. This lecture is sponsored in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Capital Community College Foundation, with additional support from CT Humanities.
The Measure of Black (Un)Fitness: Legacies of Slavery in the Early Eugenics Movement
Rana A. Hogarth, Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
National Institute of Health
Thursday, April 28, 2022 • 2:00 pm
live streaming at https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=44365
This presentation considers how people of African descent became targets of eugenic study during the early decades of the twentieth century. It delves into the methods and assumptions eugenicists used to cast people of African descent as inherently unfit. Eugenicists saw blackness as a heritable trait that signaled a lack of vitality, innate promiscuity, and low achievement. That said, views about Black people’s inherent unfitness circulated well before the advent of eugenics. As such, this paper highlights the ways in which studies on fitness, some of which were carried out by the United States government in the aftermath of the Civil War, proved instrumental in laying the groundwork for future eugenic studies of people of African descent. Drawing upon a number of sources from NLM’s digital collections, Dr. Hogarth will trace the genealogy of ideas white eugenicists held about black people’s allegedly inherent unfitness in medical writings from the era of slavery and beyond. Dr. Hogarth’s talk is co-sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of the NLM/NEH partnership to collaborate on research, education, and career initiatives.
In the News
This Is Why It Took More Than 100 Years to Get an Anti-Lynching Bill
Jamelle Bouie, April 1, 2022, The New York Times
On Tuesday, President Biden signed a bill to make lynching a federal crime. Devised by a group of Black lawmakers in the House and Senate — Tim Scott of South Carolina, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Bobby Rush of Illinois and Kamala Harris of California (when she was still in the Senate) — the law comes into being after more than 200 failed attempts, over more than 100 years, to pass anti-lynching legislation through Congress.
“Lynching was pure terror to enforce the lie that not everyone, not everyone belongs in America, not everyone is created equal,” Biden said, speaking to civil rights leaders, journalists and others during the signing ceremony at the White House.
“Lynching is not a relic of the past,” said Vice President Harris. “Racial acts of terror still occur in our nation. And when they do, we must all have the courage to name them and hold the perpetrators to account.”
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‘This Is a Crime Against the Laws of Humanity’
Jamelle Bouie, April 2, 2022, The New York Times
I spent a little time in my Friday column going over the details of the 1918 Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which was the first major piece of anti-lynching legislation introduced to the United States Congress. It’s named after Representative Leonidas C. Dyer, a white Republican from Missouri who represented a largely Black constituency in St. Louis.
Dyer was elected to Congress in 1910 and introduced an anti-lynching bill in 1911, but it was killed in committee. As the historian Philip Dray notes in “At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America,” Dyer “redoubled his efforts after the East St. Louis riot of 1917”:
When he appeared before a congressional committee investigating the violence, he referred to the East St. Louis assaults on innocent black men, women, and children as “the most dastardly and most criminal outrages ever perpetrated in this country,” and estimated that there had been five hundred black fatalities, a number well above any other estimate, including that of the NAACP.
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‘Who’s Black and Why?’
John Samuel Harpham, March 31, 2022, The Chronicle of Higher Education
What is race? By now, we all know that race is an idea: It is the product of human reflection rather than mere observation of the facts of the world. Race cannot be said to have been discovered; it had to be invented. This aspect of the subject is now so familiar that almost all recent books about its origins and development have announced in their title the intention to explore some chapter in the long and awful narrative of what they call the “invention of race.” Hence the title of the new book edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Andrew S. Curran, Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race.
Like all ideas, race has a history. There was a time before it. In turn conceptions of it have shifted over time, and it has been charged with different meanings in different settings. In the past decade or so, some of the most vital and original studies in the history of race have been produced by scholars of medieval and Renaissance Europe. Scholars like Geraldine Heng, M. Lindsay Kaplan, Cord Whitaker, and Noémie Ndiaye have worked to uncover old patterns of bias and hatred against peoples whose difference was perceived to be collective, innate, and in some sense permanent. These scholars have put pressure upon the conventional account that holds that the earliest origins of race are to be found in 18th-century European culture.
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A life documented: Winkfield, an enslaved man in colonial Virginia
Terry L. Meyers, March 31, 2022, OUP Blog
The odds are long against learning much about any individual among the millions of people once enslaved in America. At the University of Virginia, for example, a monument to the enslaved who built and maintained the university from 1817 to 1865 commemorates some 4,000 workers identified in school records. But fewer than a thousand have names, and most of those lack family names. The rest are noted on the monument by their job or relation, “midwife,” “cook,” “laborer,” and so on. More than 3,000 are remembered only by marks or jobs.
At the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, the case is the same.
With one exception: Winkfield.
As part of a new memorial, a team of historians identified some 180 people that the university either owned or hired, or who were associated with the school during its first 172 years. Some have names—Lemon, Adam, Betty, Priscilla—but most are known only by what we call “sightings” in local records: “paid hire a Negro wench 2 years,” “paid Mr Allen hire of a Negro.”
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James Madison’s Montpelier strips power from enslaved descendants group
Gregory S. Schneider, March 25, 2022, The Washington Post
James Madison’s Montpelier estate drew national attention last year when the board that manages the historic home announced plans to share authority equally with descendants of people who were once enslaved there.
But that unique arrangement appeared in tatters Friday afternoon as the board voted to strip power-sharing status from the Montpelier Descendants Committee, a group representing African Americans who trace their roots to the community.
The vote caps at least two years of rising tensions between the board and the committee, even as Montpelier’s reputation has grown as a pioneer in empowering groups who were traditionally marginalized by the telling of history.
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Announcements
CFP: Managing Imperial Legacies Conference
University of Edinburgh, Historic Environment Scotland and the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights
22 and 23 June 2022
Deadline: 14 April 2022
This network plans to hold a conference on the 22-23rd June 2022, of which selected papers will be published as conference proceedings. Papers can be presented in person in Edinburgh, or remotely, and will address the following themes:
• Empire and Heritage Policy
• Expanding Narratives of Imperial Legacies within Community
• Recognising Slavery in our Built Environment
We are keen to invite speakers from inside and outside of academia, and those
working within the above themes in Scotland, or anywhere in the world. We hope that cross national conversations can be held within this conference to promote shared experiences and learning. Conference proceedings from selected papers will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2023.
Please email proposal submissions of 500 words (max), along with a short personal resume of 300 words to: managingimperiallegacies@gmail.com. Deadline for proposals is 14th April 2022. Confirmation will be sent out to speakers in late April.
Public Humanities Fellow, Commemorative to Enslaved Peoples of Southern Maryland
St. Mary’s College of Maryland
Deadline: April 15, 2022
St. Mary’s College of Maryland is accepting résumés for the one-year position of National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Public Humanities Fellow. The Public Humanities Fellow is charged with building on national attention for the College’s recently dedicated Commemorative to Enslaved Peoples of Southern Maryland by leading a one-year NEH grant-funded project. By supporting existing humanities programming and participating in community engagement work with invested people and projects in the campus and local community, the Public Humanities Fellow will take responsibility for two central objectives: 1) creating a long-term plan for activities and public outreach related to this monument for use by the College; and 2) completing scholarly research in the humanities related to the Fellow’s expertise that bears directly on the experiences of the enslaved in the historical and contemporary American landscape. This is a full-time, one-year temporary contingent position.
National History Teacher of the Year (2022)
Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
Deadline for 2022 nominations: April 30, 2022
NOMINATE A TEACHER TODAY!
National winner chosen from among state winners receives a $10,000 prize presented at an award ceremony in their honor in New York City. State winners receive a $1,000 prize, an archive of classroom resources, and recognition at a ceremony in their state.
CFP: Race, Slavery, and Land. Moravian Legacies in a Global Context, 1722-2000
Moravian University, Bethlehem, PA
November 4-5, 2022
Deadline: April 30, 2022
We are inviting paper proposals for a symposium on Race, Slavery, and Land. Moravian Legacies in a Global Context, 1722-2000 to be held in-person at Moravian University in Bethlehem, PA, November 4-5, 2022. June 2022 marks the 300th anniversary of the founding of Herrnhut by Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, the 290th of the sending of the first two Moravian missionaries to the Danish West Indies (present U.S. Virgin Islands), and the 281st of the founding of Bethlehem on the land of the Lenape nation. More than ever before institutions, movements, and communities are facing their own histories and the role of racism and slavery therein. This calls for the rethinking and investigation of the interactions of race, slavery, and land in Moravian institutions and communities across global contexts. Proposals addressing any facets of these themes are welcome, especially those that address indigenous communities and especially from early career scholars.
Conference planners intend to include selected papers for publication. Please send a proposal of 300 words and a CV to Professor Heikki Lempa, Department of History, Moravian University at: lempah@moravian.edu by April 30, 2022 EST.
CFP: Slave Dwelling Conference 2022: The Stono Rebellion and the Atlantic World
College of Charleston in Charleston, SC
September 8-10, 2022
Deadline: May 1, 2022
The 2022 Slave Dwelling Project Conference will take place September 8-10, 2022, at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC. Concurrent with The Stono Legacy Project, a month-long commemoration of the 1739 Stono Rebellion, this 7th national SDP conference will take place in a hybrid format, with in-person activities in and around Charleston as well as a number of live-streamed virtual events.
We are seeking proposals for both 60-minute and 90-minute sessions on the Stono Rebellion itself as well as other important rebellions by enslaved Africans throughout the Atlantic World. We are also seeking sessions on the subsequent legacy of these events—up to and including the present day. We welcome both scholarly presentations, panels, and round-tables as well as sessions on historic sites and interpretation, and cultural offerings.
Proposals will be accepted between March 15 and May 1, 2022. Questions should be directed to the Slave Dwelling Project at slavedwellingproject@gmail.com.
Black Lives Matter: Lessons from a Global Movement
May 21, 2022 to May 22, 2022
Deadline for Submission: 10 May 2022
GIRES, the Global Institute for Research Education & Scholarship and the Greenwood African American Studies Center (GAASC) wish to explore the phenomenon of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.
The social media campaigns that transformed into one of the most important movements in the United States and sparkled racial justice protests across the globe. Black Lives Matter slogan became famous internationally and created a vast network of grass-roots organizations and a moral collective for activists and supporters social justice and equality.
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