Philip Reichel: Slave Patrols: Origins of the Police

During his more than 45 years in academia, Professor Reichel has received awards for teaching, advising, service, and scholarship. He is the author of several textbooks and has authored or co-authored more than forty articles and book chapters. His areas of expertise include comparative justice systems, transnational crime generally, and human trafficking more specifically. Professor Reichel discusses his articles "Southern slave patrols as a transitional police type" and "The…

Laura Bieger: Essay as Politics

Laura Bieger is Professor of American Studies, Political Theory and Culture at the University of Groningen, where she co-directs the Research Center for Democratic Culture and Politics. In this interview, Prof. Bieger discusses her essay “The 1619 Project as Aesthetic and Social Practice

Adam Malka: Rise of Baltimore Police

Adam Malka is an Associate Professor of U.S. History at the University of Oklahoma. Professor Malka discusses his book "The Men of Mobtown" exploring how the free black population of the antebellum South came to be controlled and policed. We explore the roles and expectations of white citizens and how black freedom came to define criminal behavior.

Atiba Ellis: Polley V. Ratcliff

Atiba R. Ellis is a Professor of Law at Marquette University Law School. Professor Ellis discusses his essay "Polley V. Ratcliff: A New Way To Adress an Original Sin?" A fascinating court case, recently resolved, involving kidnapping, slavery, and freedom which might serve as a roadmap for a type of Truth and Reconciliation style reparation. Prof. Ellis explains how the past is still alive and able to be resolved today.

Manisha Shina: History of Reparations

A historian of the long nineteenth century, her research interests lie specifically in the transnational histories of slavery, abolition, and feminism and the history and legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She is currently writing a book on the Reconstruction of American democracy after the Civil War. Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She received her Ph.D from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft…

Alex Reinert: 8th Amendment Debate

Alex Reinert is the Max Freund Professor Litigation and Advocacy at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Prof. Reinert discusses his article "Reconceptualizing the Eighth Amendment: Slaves, Prisoners, and 'Cruel and Unusual' Punishment." Prof. Reinert talks about "the law of slavery" and how little we have travelled from the 1870s to today when it comes to the understanding of "cruel and unsual" punishment as the standard of imprisonment.

Thomas Craemer: Estimating the Cost of Reparations

Thomas Craemer obtained a political science doctorate in 2001 from the University of Tuebingen in his native Germany, and a PhD from Stony Brook University, New York, in 2005. He teaches at the University of Connecticut’s Department of Public Policy. His experience of growing up in post-World-War II Germany motivated his research on implicit racial attitudes and race-related policies including slavery reparations. In 2015, he published an article titled Estimating Slavery Reparations that has…

Reginald Bell: Black Slave Owners

Reginald L. Bell is a Professor of Management in the College of Business at Prairie View A&M University. Bell received his PhD in Business Education from the University of Missouri at Columbia. Bell writes mostly in the management communication area, which is his research focus. Bell has more than 80 articles published in peer reviewed journals and trade publications. He is the author, with Jeanette S. Martin, of three books on Managerial Communication. Dr. Bell discusses his article…

Michael Conklin: Public Opinion of Reparations

In this interview we discuss Prof. Conklin's paper An Unhill Battle for Reparationists: A Quantitative Analysis of the Effectiveness of Slavery Reparations Rhetoric. Prof. Conklin walks us through his research on normal citizen's attitudes toward granting or recieving reparations. The findings are often at odds with conventional assumptions.

David Waldstreicher: Historians and the 1619 Debate

Professor Waldstreicher discusses his book "Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification." Specifically focusing in on the slavery compromises written into the US Constitution - we go into some depth about 3/5th Compromise which enshrined slavery as a means of governing. Next Prof. Waldstreicher explains his position on the New York Times' 1619 Project, specifically focused on his Boston Review article "The Hidden Stakes of the 1619 Controversy."

Rana Hogarth: Slavery and Medicine

Professor Hogarth discusses her research into how the professionalization of medicine and the production of scientific knowledge in the Americas was bound up with the making of race. We talk about her first book, "Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840" and how white physicians defined blackness as a medically significant marker of difference in slave societies of the American Atlantic. And the legacy slave bodies had on the foundations of…

Sherri Burr: Free Blacks of Virginia

In 2015, she was awarded a Monticello Fellowship to conduct research on the Free Blacks of Virginia, the hundreds of thousands of African-Americans who were free before the Civil War. Burr’s ancestors were among this group. Professor Burr discusses her research which became her 27th book, "Complicated Lives: Free Blacks in Virginia, 1619-1865."

Kelsey Klotz: Dave Brubeck's Civil Rights Advocacy

Kelsey Klotz discusses her research on the intersection of race and sound in 1950s and 1960s American music, with a focus on jazz. She published her first book "Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness," which uses Brubeck’s mid-century performance of whiteness across his professional, private, and political lives as a starting point to understand mid-century whiteness, privilege, and white supremacy, more fully.

Caitlin Rosenthal: Capitalist Management of Slavery

Caitlin Rosenthal discusses her book, "Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management," won the Simpkins Award of the Southern Historical Association as well as the first book prize of the Economic History Society. It was also featured as a "Five Books" best book in economics for 2018. The book explores the development of business practices on slave plantations and uses this history to understand the relationship between slave plantation management, violence, and innovation

Alexis Hoag: Race and the Death Penalty

Alexis Hoag, Practitioner in Residence at Columbia Law School’s Holder Initiative, discusses the systemic racial issues at the heart of our Judicial system. Professor Hoag is an anti-death penalty advocate who recently published, "Valuing Black Lives: A Case for Ending the Death Penalty" and argued before the Ohio Supreme Court advocating for Glen Bates.

Todd Michney: Redlining and Home Owners Loan Company

In this inaugural session of the Heights Library Unpacking Our History interviews, we talk to Todd M. Michney, who shares insights from his book "Surrogate Suburbs: Black Upward Mobility and Neighborhood Change in Cleveland, 1900–1980," about redlining and the HOLC's role in housing discrimination.