David S. Brown: Hell of a Storm Coming of the Civil War

David S. Brown discusses his new book, "Hell of a Storm: The Battle for Kansas, the End of Compromise, and the Coming of the Civil War." With chapters on Emerson, Stowe, Thoreau, and Fitzhugh, alongside with a cast of presidents, abolitionists, and black emigrationists, Professor Brown shows how political, cultural, and literary history foreshadow the coming of the Civil War. David S. Brown, is a Horace E. Raffensperger professor of history at Elizabethtown College.

Marcy Dinius: Legacy of David Walker's "Appeal"

Marcy Dinius discusses her book, The Textual Effects of David Walker's "Appeal": Print-Based Activism Against Slavery, Racism, and Discrimination, 1829-1851. David Walker's "Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829-1830)" was one of the first antislavery texts published that openly called for slave self-defense and resistance. Professor Dinius explores how Walker used research and typography to introduce varied levels of readership and understanding to…

Kellie Carter Jackson: Black Resistance to White Supremacy

Kellie Carter Jackson, Professor of Africana Studies and the Chair of the Africana Studies Department Wellesley College, discusses her book, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance. Prof. Carter Jackson explains how she sees black resistance to white supremacy falling to several categories — revolution, protection, force, flight and joy. To illustrate how each one works in history, she recounts stories of ordinary people's everyday refusals and rebellions, focusing on the activism…

Alexandra Urakova: Gift Giving in Uncle Tom's Cabin

Alexandra Urakova discusses her article, ""I do not want her, I am sure": Commodities, Gifts, and Poisonous Gifts in Uncle Tom's Cabin." Professor Urakova sees gift giving in Uncle Tom's Cabin as a disruption within the sentimental context of the narrative. Topsy and Orphelia, Eva and Tom, and Shelby and St. Clare are all complicated and compromised in the act of gift giving or receiving, especially by what it means to give the gift of an enslaved person.…

Felicity Turner: Proving Pregnancy

Felicity Turner, Associate Professor in the Department of History at Georgia Southern University, discusses her book Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America. Professor Turner explores the intersection of law and the emerging medical professionalization in cases of infanticide in the United States. By examining the legal documents, she is able to show how women's knowledge was invaluable to pregnancy and birth, often called to be expert witnesses…

Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy: Colonial Slavery and Disability

Professor Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy discusses her book, “Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean,” which examines the relationship between disability, antiblack racism, and slavery in the sugar-producing colonies of the British Caribbean. Prof. Hunt-Kennedy explains how disability was a defining feature of slavery’s violence and it’s antiblack racism. Professor Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, Associate Professor, Department of History at the University of New Brunswick. She…

Christopher Span: Book Learning and Slave Education

Christopher Span, Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discusses his work, “Sam’s Cottonfield Blues” and “Quest for Book Learning: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom.” He discusses why literacy was so feared by white enslavers and crucial to slaves. Detailing how slaves subverted the rules to learn to read while enslavers punished those who did. Prof. Span’s own family provides a powerful example of the rhythm and style of…

Gerald Horne: Texas: Race, War, Colonialism

Professor Gerald Horne discusses his book, The Counter-revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of American Fascism. Prof. Horne explains his thesis that Texas was a goldmine for Euro-Americans since it provided the dual economics of land speculation and the expansion of slavery, praxis for settler colonialism, and a built in challengers to white supremacy in Mexico and the Native Americans. Texas served as a lynchpin in the coming of the Civil War and a proving ground for…

Deirdre Cooper Owens: Slavery Origins of Gynecology

Professor Deirdre Cooper Owens discusses her book, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology, which traces the origins of American reproductive health to slave hospitals. As white doctors expanded their practices onto plantations, quickly pregnancy and birth became the focus of their practices. Dr. James Marion Sims with other nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on enslaved…

Stephen Kenny: Slave Hospitals

Professor Stephen Kenny discusses his article, “A Dictate of Both Interest and Mercy”: Slave Hospitals in the Antebellum South.” Beginning on the shores of West Africa, White doctors began to systematize racialized medicine in the service of slavery. Establishing institutions of idealized models of slave care, the story of slave hospitals became a self-serving lie of enslaver benevolence and racial difference. Plantation hospitals were rooms or shacks, while urban spaces resembled prisons. The…

Alys Weinbaum: Slavery and Surrogacy

Alys Weinbaum, professor of English at the University of Washington, discusses her book, The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery. Professr Weinbaum examines how the legal and cultural impact of Atlantic slavery defined slave reproduction and enslaved women as “biocapital.” This form of racialized capitalism changed human reproduction from kinship to “breeding.” How this ideology remains four centuries later in the emerging markets for female egg harvesting to the multimillion dollar international…

Jenifer Barclay: Slavery and Disability

Jenifer Barclay is an associate professor and the Associate Director at the Center for Disability Studies at the University of Buffalo. Professor Jenifer Barclay discusses how disability and ablism helped shape American ideas of slavery, black bodies, and the medical practice. She explains how the antebellum South justified slavery by linking blackness to disability, defectiveness, and dependency. Both proslavery and abolitionists used disability as a frame to further their arguments about the…

Samantha Pinto: Hemmings, Baartman, and Complicated Fame

Samantha Pinto is a Professor, Department of English and Director, Humanities Institute at University of Texas at Austin. Professor Samantha Pinto discusses her book, Infamous Bodies Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights. Using the idea of "vulnerability" as a touchstone to explain the celebrity of Sally Hemings and Sarah "the Hottentot Venus" Baartman, Prof. Pinto describes how each woman's agency is complicated by dominant systems of coercion and…

Kathryn Olivarius: Yellow Fever and New Orleans

Professor Kathryn Olivarius, Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University, discusses her book, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom. Professor Olivarius uses yellow fever to frame how wealth, class, and race developed in the economic powerhouse antebellum city of New Orleans. Developing from three vector points of disease, acclimation, and immunocapital the social and political elite held their grip over the economics of the city by weaponizing yellow fever.…

Gerald Horne: Colonialism: Religion, Class, Race

Gerald Horne is an American historian who holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. Professor Gerald Horne discusses his book, The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century. Prof. Horne explains his thesis that religion, which supported so much colonial expansion, gave way to race, specifically whiteness, as a way of organizing conquest.…

Christopher Willougby: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools

Christopher Willoughby is a historian of Atlantic slavery, U.S. medicine, and racism and a Visiting Assistant Professor of History of Medicine and Health at Pitzer College. Christopher Willoughby, a Visiting Assistant Professor of History of Medicine and Health at Pitzer College,talks about his book, Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools. Professor Willoughby discusses the origins of racialized medicine as was taught in Antebellum Medical Schools. Exploring how…

Robert Pierce Forbes: Race and Jefferson's Notes

Robert Pierce Forbes taught U.S. history at the University of Connecticut and was the founding associate director of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Robert Pierce Forbes discusses his introduction, scholarship, and editorship of Thomas Jefferson's seminal work, "Notes on the State of Virgina." Prof. Forbes locates the origin of United States' racial dynamic in Jefferson's notes on race. Specifically, how Jefferson,…

Barbara Krauthammer: Black Slaves, Indian Masters

Barbara Krauthamer, professor of history and Dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Professor Barbara Krauthamer discusses her book, Black Slaves, Indian Masters, which examines the role of slavery in the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations. She explores the tensions brought these Native American tribes by missionaries, trade, and the "civilizing" project of Euro-Americans. The role of slavery as a form of assimilation which Native…

Margaret Ellen Newell: Native American Slavery in New England

Professor Margaret Ellen Newell isl professor of history at Ohio State University. Professor Newell discusses her book, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery, which explores the enslavement of Indians by the English Colonists in New England. Massachusetts became the first English colony to legalize slavery in 1641, and the colonists’ desire for slaves shaped the major New England Indian wars, focusing the conflicts on obtaining captives and…

Bjorn Stillion Southard: African Colonialization Movement's Ultimate Failure

Bjørn Stillion Southard is an Associate Professor and Director of Debate at the University of Georgia. Professor Bjørn Southard discusses his book, Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement. Prof. Southard outlines how the African Colonization Movement hoped to reach some middle ground between southern enslavers and northern abolitionists in order to solve the fears both had about a free black population in the US. While the Colonization idea was supported many…

Daniel Kilbride: Cannibals, Gorillas, and Racist Travel Tropes

Daniel Kilbride is professor of history and director of the Honors Program at John Carroll University. Professor Daniel Kildride discusses his article, “Cannibals, Gorillas, and the Struggle over Radical Reconstruction.” By examining best selling travel books of explorers and missionaries in Africa the current events of the 1850-1870s take on a new racist tone. How sensational tales of cannibalism and brutality sold books and tickets on the lecture circuit to how Darwin's Origin of the…

Andres Resendez: Native American Slavery

Andrés Reséndez is a professor of history and author who grew up in Mexico City and currently teaches at the University of California at Davis. Professor Resendez discusses his book, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. Prof. Resendez discusses pre-Colonial enslavement among the native people of North America and the Caribbean. How the Spanish invasion changed native societies, altered slavery, and decimated entire populations. Also discussed is how the…

Kevin Waite: Transcontinental Ambitions of the American South

Kevin Waite is an assistant professor at Durham University in the United Kingdom. Professor Waite discusses his book, West of Slavery: the Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire. He explains his thesis that the Southern Slave States had ambitions and plans to extend slavery across the West. Prof. Waite explains how railroads, camels, and the hope for new international markets all played a part in the coming of the Civil War.

Nakia D. Parker: Slavery in the Chickasaw Nation

Nakia D. Parker is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Michigan State University. Professor Nakia Parker discusses her article, "Regarded as an Appendage of His Family”: Slavery, Family, and the Law in Indian Territory." Chattel slavery spread into the Chickasaw Nation, in part, due to the "Civilization Program." How the Chickasaw legalized ownership and kinship is the focus of our discussion.

Browen Everill: Abolition and Ethical Capitalism

Bronwen Everill is the incoming Director of the Centre of African Studies at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Gonville & Caius College. She is the author of Not Made By Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition and Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Bronwen Everill examines how abolitionists from Europe to the United States to West Africa used new ideas of supply and demand, consumer credit, and branding to shape an argument for ethical capitalism. Prof.…

Ibriham Sudiata: Slavery and the 1619 Project

Professor Ibrahim K. Sundiata is Emeritus Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Brandeis University. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the researcher has traveled extensively in South America, the Middle East and Australia. Sundiata currently resides in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, where he has held a Fulbright Professorship at the Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA -Federal University of Bahia). He is the author of four books; his last is on the Garvey…

Jennifer Morgan: Motherhood and Slavery

Jennifer L. Morgan is Professor of History in the department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University where she also serves as Chair. She is the author of Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic. Professor Morgan discusses recent journal article “Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery." Exploring how Virginia laws developed to codify enslaved women's reproductive labor, by defining and…

Randolph McLaughlin: Slavery in the Virginia Colony

Prior to joining the Pace Law School faculty in 1988, Professor McLaughlin was an attorney associated with Meyer, Suozzi, English & Klein, with whom he did litigation and labor law work. In 1978, he began his legal career at the Center for Constitutional Rights, a civil rights/civil liberties legal organization in New York City. For eight years he worked side by side with the renowned civil rights attorney William Kunstler fighting for the rights of activists and the communities across the…

Trevor Burnard: Demis of the Royal African Company

Trevor Burnard is Wilberforce Professor of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull and Director of the Wilberforce Institute. He is a specialist in the Atlantic World and slavery in plantation societies. He is the author of Only Connect: A Field Report on Early American History

Eric Herschthal: Dr. Rush's Leprosy Theory

Eric Herschthal is an assistant professor of history at the University of Utah. Professor Eric Herschthal discusses his article "The Science of Antislavery in the Early Republic: The Case of Dr. Benjamin Rush." Prof. Herschthal examines how the medical theories of Dr. Rush informed his advocacy for the American Revolution and the end of American Slavery. While some of the ideas Dr. Rush came up with seem far-fetched or deplorable today, during his lifetime, his thinking was immensely…