History and Memory of American Slavery Roundup

Eastman Johnson, "A Ride for Liberty: The Fugitive," 1862

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"Piecing Together Stories Of Families 'Lost In Slavery,'" NPR, July 16, 2012

For decades, slavery tore apart African-American families. Children were sold off from their mothers, and husbands were taken from their wives. Many desperately tried to keep track of each other, even running away to find loved ones. After the Civil War and emancipation, these efforts intensified. Freed slaves posted ads in newspapers and wrote letters — seeking any clue to a family member's whereabouts.

In Help Me to Find My People, author Heather Andrea Williams examines the emotional toll of separation during slavery and of the arduous journey many slaves took to reunite their families.>>>

Christian Boone, "Controversial slavery mural gets new home," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 16, 2012

A controversial mural depicting slavery that until recently greeted visitors to the Georgia Department of Agriculture will be back on display starting in August.

The Georgia Museum of Art, located on the University of Georgia campus, has rescued the painting — part of a series of murals produced by Atlanta-based artist George Beattie in 1956 chronicling the state's agricultural history — from a state storage facility and will debut the collection Aug. 1.>>>

Amy Wimmer Schwarb, "U.S. conference highlights slaves' southern path to freedom," Reuters, June 20, 2012

With the North Star as the guiding light for runaway slaves and Canada as the Promised Land, the underground railroad that U.S. schoolchildren read about in textbooks points to freedom in just one direction - the north.

But scholars gathering this week for the National Underground Railroad Conference will head south to St. Augustine, Florida, home to the former capital of Spanish Florida and a flight-to-freedom story rooted in the 17th century that is unknown to most Americans.>>>

Ira Chernus, "Slavery and 'Big Government': The Emancipation Proclamation’s Lessons 150 Years Later," History News Network, July 12, 2012

One hundred fifty years ago today, on July 13, 1862, Abraham Lincoln went out for a carriage ride with his Secretary of State, William Seward, and his Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles. Lincoln told them (as Welles recalled it) that he had “about come to the conclusion that it was a military necessity absolutely essential for the salvation of the Union, that we must free the slaves.” That was the seed of conception for the Emancipation Proclamation, which came to birth five and half months later, giving Lincoln his greatest legacy: “He freed the slaves.” It’s a story everyone knows.

But it’s not quite accurate. Only the slaves in the Confederate states were emancipated. Citizens of the Union could still own slaves.>>>

Dawn Turner Trice, "First lady's ancestry an American story," Chicago Tribune, June 18, 2012

Many Americans are fascinated by the family history of Michelle Obama, a descendant of slaves who is the nation's first African-American first lady.

You've learned a lot about her ancestry in this newspaper. Now, add to that a new book due out Tuesday, "American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White, and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama.">>>

Black Confederates, the Internet, and the Teaching of History

Heather Cox Richardson

The recent flap over the Virginia grade school textbook that asserted thousands of African Americans fought for the Confederacy brings up a couple of issues of interest to history teachers (aside from the obvious historical issues of race and the Civil War).

First, it raises the question of why on earth any school system would buy a textbook written by someone without training in the subject and published by a non-academic press, but that’s about politics, not history, so I’ll skip that for now.

Another big question here, though, is the use of the internet for research. Anyone who teaches history today knows that students invariably turn to the web as their main source of information. That’s just what textbook author Joy Masoff—who has no training in history and is best known for her book Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty—said she had done to research the material for her textbook.

Just like Masoff, students have no idea whether what they find on the internet is true or false.

A good tool for teaching students about the perils of relying on internet sources is to show them these two photos, which happen to address the issue of black Confederate soldiers (and which almost certainly played a part in Masoff’s mistake).

In 2005, Jerome S. Handler, a senior scholar at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and Michael L. Tuite, Jr., the former director of the University of Virginia Library Digital Media Lab, examined an image of black Confederate soldiers widespread on the web and popular among neo-Confederates. They published their conclusions on the web as “Retouching History: The Modern Falsification of a Civil War Photograph.”

In their paper, they traced how the real photograph of black Union soldiers pictured above was scanned and digitally manipulated into the fake photograph of the “1st Louisiana Native Guard.” It’s a fascinating story.

I make it a point to talk the students through these photographs early in my Civil War history class, both to show them that they can’t believe everything they find on the internet, and to indicate just how aggressively modern politically-motivated organizations have advanced false information about the Civil War. Invariably, the students like the comparison of the photographs and the discussion of why someone would want to manipulate an image in this way.

And it does seem to have some effect on the degree to which they trust the internet.

Dispatches from the Historical Society Conference, Day 1: Small Window, Big Picture?

Randall Stephens

A well-attended session on Thursday afternoon here at George Washington University dealt with what we can know or generalize about on a local level. What does the

information at the local level tell us about slavery and freedom in the antebellum South? It deserves attention here. I include videos below of the presenters (due to youtube's 10 minute limit, I've only included the first 9 minutes or so from each):

"Does It Take a Small Window to See the Big Picture?"

Chair and Commentator: Melvin Patrick Ely, College of William and Mary

Presenters:

Nancy A. Hillman, College of William and Mary
“Drawn Together, Drawn Apart: Biracial Fellowship and Black Leadership in Virginia Baptist Churches Before and After Nat Turner”

Jennifer R. Loux, Library of Virginia

“How Proslavery Southerners Became Emancipationists: Slavery and Regional Identity in Frederick County, Maryland”

Ted Maris-Wolf, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
“Self-Enslavement in Virginia, 1856-1864: How Two Free Black Men Shaped a Law That Fueled the National Debate Over Slavery”

Melvin Patrick Ely, College of William and Mary
“What the Reviewers Should Have Criticized about Israel on the Appomattox, But Didn’t”

Ely summarizes the session as follows:

Histories of localities have won considerable attention over the years. Examples range from Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou and several important books on New England towns to Charles Dew’s Bond of Iron and Melvin Patrick Ely’s Israel on the Appomattox. Some distinguished

reviewers have recognized the assiduousness of the research that underpins certain of these studies and even praised the “sophisticated” analysis they may offer—yet these critics tend to write off the stories these works tell as atypical, and to deprecate their local perspective as inherently unreflective of broader realities. Eric Foner has added that “local histories, so valuable in bringing into sharp relief the details of daily life, seem to have an inherent bias toward continuity as opposed to historical change,” especially when the locality in question is rural. Such critics typically go on to praise canonical histories of entire regions (for example, “the American South”) because they “allow far more scope for generalizations.” But how useful are generalizations that turn out to be contradicted on the ground in one locality after another?

The members of this panel recognize that the historian’s job is to gather, organize, and interpret data in ways that yield reasonably broad, meaningful conclusions. But we also contend that sweeping conclusions that cannot account for the complexities pervading the lives of real people are not worth very much. A signal challenge for historians in the twenty-first century is to ferret out the particulars of life as people really lived it and to draw from those details conclusions that are both well founded and widely significant. . . .

Each of us finds that local realities seriously complicate and sometimes contradict received generalizations. Laws passed following the Nat Turner rebellion did not end black preaching and church leadership in Virginia, thanks to the assertiveness of black Baptists supported by more than a few of their white brethren (Hillman). Whites in western Maryland, far from identifying instinctively with the North at the onset of the Civil War, wrapped themselves in the mantle of Southernness and of proslavery orthodoxy—yet

within less than two years, two-thirds of the white men of Frederick County came to support Lincoln and Emancipation (Loux). The Virginia law of 1856 allowing free blacks to enslave themselves to white masters was not an expression of spiraling antipathy toward free African Americans or of a general desire among whites to reduce them to bondage; in fact, the law’s framers formulated it in concert with free blacks themselves as a measure to protect certain black individuals (Maris-Wolf). And in a society of profound inequality, many whites nevertheless adopted a live-and-let-live attitude toward free blacks (Ely). Ely chaired the panel; after the other panelists offered presentations of their work on the subjects just named, Ely offered a closing comment, drawing on those presentations and on his own work to address what this proposal has called the big questions.

Still Time to Register for the Historical Society Conference in DC

Randall Stephens

Eric Arnesen, George Washington University, has put together a terrific program for the Historical Society Conference next week at GWU's Marvin Center. And, there is still time to register for "Historical Inquiry in the New Century," at a reduced rate, if you have not already done so.

The conference will feature panels on a variety of topics, ranging from high school history teaching, historians as expert witnesses, and military history to gender, religion in modern Britain, and the Medieval West (you can read some of those papers now on-line). The conference has a number of sessions devoted to labor history and African-American history. The latter includes:

THURSDAY, JUNE 3

1:00-2:30

Session ID: SLAVERY, HISTORY, AND THE FUTURE: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Room 309

Chair: Robert Cottrol, George Washington University School of Law

Karlee-Anne Sapoznik, York University
"‘They Say That It's Culture, but It's Abuse’: Slavery and Servile Marriage in Historical and Contemporary Perspective”

Jeffrey Gunn, York University
"Evolving History in the 21st Century: The Paramount Role of Autobiography and Biography in Linking Historical and Contemporary Issues"

2:45-4:15pm

Session IID: DOES IT TAKE A SMALL WINDOW TO SEE THE BIG PICTURE?
Room 309

Chair: Melvin Patrick Ely, College of William and Mary

Melvin Patrick Ely
"What Reviewers Should Have Criticized about Israel on the Appomattox, But Didn't"

Nancy A. Hillman, College of William and Mary, "Drawn Together, Drawn Apart: Biracial Fellowship and Black Leadership in Virginia Baptist Churches Before and After Nat Turner"

Jennifer R. Loux, Library of Virginia, "How Proslavery Southerners Became Emancipationists: Slavery and Regional Identity in Frederick County, Maryland"

Ted Maris-Wolf, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
"Self-Enslavement in Virginia, 1856-1864: How Two Free Black Men Shaped a Law That Fueled the National Debate Over Slavery"

Comment: Melvin Patrick Ely

FRIDAY, JUNE 4

8:30-10:00am

Session IA: CIVIL RIGHTS AND THE BACKLASH
Room 301

Chair: Sonya Michel, Woodrow Wilson Center

Jerald Podair, Lawrence University, “‘One City, One Standard’: The Struggle for Equality in Rudolph Giuliani's New York”

Brett Gadsden, Emory University, “Refiguring White Backlash: Joseph Biden and the Liberal Retreat from School Desegregation”

Clarence Taylor, Baruch College, “The New York City Teacher's Union and Civil Rights”

Comment: Sonya Michel

10:15-11:45am

Session IIA: RETHINKING EMANCIPATION
Room 301

Chair: Alex Lichtenstein, Florida International University

James Oakes, CUNY Graduate Center
"Rethinking Emancipation"

Comment: Alex Lichtenstein

Comment: Chandra Manning, Georgetown University

2:45-4:15pm

Session IVA: STATE OF THE FIELD: TWENTIETH-CENTURY AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY
Room 301

Chair: Adele Alexander, George Washington University

Daniel Letwin, Pennsylvania State University, "Black Political Thought in the Age of the New Negro"

Carol Anderson, Emory University, "Freedom Fighters on the Cold War Plantation: The Histories of African Americans' Anticolonialism"

Mary Ellen Curtin, University of Essex, "Race, Gender, and American Politics since 1965"

4:30-6:00pm

Session VA: "THE LONG CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT": A ROUNDTABLE
Room 301

Chair: Eric Arnesen, George Washington University

Patricia Sullivan, University of South Carolina

J. Mills Thornton, University of Michigan

Beth Bates, Wayne State University

Robert Korstad, Duke University

James Leloudis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

SATURDAY, JUNE 5

8:30-10:00am

Session IE: RACE, POLITICS, PROSTITUTION, AND THE COLLAPSE OF RECONSTRUCTION IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH
Room 413-14

Chair: Leslie Rowland, University of Maryland

Emily Landau, University of Maryland, “Public Rights and Public Women: Plessy, Prostitution, and the Effects of Reconstruction’s Demise in New Orleans 1862-1896”

Michael A. Ross, University of Maryland, “Creole Icarus: Jean Baptiste Jourdain and the Rise and Fall of Reconstruction in New Orleans”

Comment: John Rodrigue, Stonehill College

10:15-11:45am

Session IIA: NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE HISTORY OF CIVIL RIGHTS AND RACE IN THE U.S., I
Room 301

Chair: James Miller, George Washington University

Thomas Guglielmo, George Washington University, “Raising a Black and ‘So-Called White’ Military: Race-Making and America's World War II Draft”

Touré Reed, Illinois State University, “The Urban League in the New Deal Era”

Yevette Richards Jordan, George Mason University, “George McCray and the Shifting Dimensions of a Transnational Black Identity in Newly Independent Ghana”

1:00-2:30pm

Session IIIA: NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE HISTORY OF CIVIL RIGHTS AND RACE IN THE U.S., II
Room 301

Chair: David Chappell, University of Oklahoma

Kevin Gerard Boyle, Ohio State University, “Redemption: Civil Rights, History, and the Promise of America”

Joseph Kip Kosek, George Washington University, “‘Who Is Their God?’: Religion and the Civil Rights Movement”

Sophia Z. Lee, Yale University, “Without the Intervention of Lawyers’: Race, Labor, and Conservative Politics in 1950s America”

Comment: David Chappell

2:45-4:15pm

Session IVB: RACE AND LABOR IN THE CONTEMPORARY SOUTH
Room 307

Chair: Robert H. Zieger, University of Florida

Jane Berger, Cornell University, "'A Lot Closer To What It Ought To Be': Black Women and Public-Sector Employment in Baltimore, 1950-1975"

Rob Chase, Case Western Reserve University, "Slaves of the State Revolt: Southern Prison Labor and a Prison-Made Civil Rights Movement, 1960-1980"

Michael Dennis, Acadia University, "The Virginia Organizing Project and the Movement for Economic Democracy"

Comment: Robert H. Zieger

Session IVD: TRADITIONS, REVISIONS, AND PUBLIC THEOLOGIES IN AFRICAN AMERICA
Room 309

Chair: Richard S. Newman, Rochester Institute of Technology

David Waldstreicher, Temple University, "Phillis Wheatley, Religion, and the American Revolutionaries"

Jacqueline Robinson, St. Joseph's University, “A Halfway Covenant for Harlem: The Public Theology of William Lloyd Imes”

Comment: Richard S. Newman

Session IVE: NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE STUDY OF RACE AND SLAVERY
Room 413-14

Chair: Mark Smith, University of South Carolina

Joyce Malcolm, George Mason University School of Law, “Slavery in 18th-Century Massachusetts and the American Revolution”

Robert Cottrol, George Washington School of Law, “Race-Based Slavery and Race-Based Citizenship: How Brazil and the United States Became Different”

Amy Long Caffee, University of South Carolina, “Hearing Africa: Early Modern Europeans’ Auditory Perceptions of the African Other”

4:30-6:00pm

Session VA: NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE HISTORY OF CIVIL RIGHTS AND RACE IN THE U.S., III
Room 301

Chair: Steven Reich, James Madison University

James Ralph, Middlebury College, “‘It is an Eternal Struggle’: The Pursuit of Civil Rights in the Land of Lincoln”

James D. Wolfinger, DePaul University, “‘The American Ideals of Justice and Equality’: The African-American Fight for Equal Rights in Levittown”

Kenneth Mack, Harvard Law School, “Race, Representation, and the Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer”

CIC/Gilder Lehrman American History Seminar

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, CIC, and the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) will cosponsor the eighth annual seminar on American history to be held at Yale University, June 13-16, 2010. The seminar is open to all full time faculty members in history, English, and related fields at CIC and UNCF institutions. David W. Blight, Class of 1954 Professor of American History at Yale University will lead the seminar on “Slave Narratives.” Slave narratives that have recently come to light are rich sources for the teaching of history, literature, and related fields. The seminar will focus on a number of these texts.

Funder: The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

Program Status: Nominations for the 2010 seminar are due Monday, March 15, 2010. The seminar will be held at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. To apply, refer to the materials below.