“Too Soon? Is it Time Already to Consider What the Civil War Sesquicentennial Can Tell Us About Our Past and Present?”

Ari Kelman will discuss the nation’s effort to grapple with the lingering impact of the Civil War around the 150th anniversary of the conflict.

The final lecture, on Saturday, is titled “Did Reconstruction Have a Sesquicentennial?“

Ari Kelman is Chancellor’s Leadership Professor of History and Faculty Advisor to the Chancellor and Provost at the University of California, Davis.  He is the author, most recently, of Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War (Hill and Wang, 2015), as well as A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Harvard University Press, 2013), recipient of several national awards and honors, including the Bancroft Prize, and A River and Its City:  The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (University of California Press, 2003), which won the Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize.  Kelman’s essays and articles have appeared in Slate, The New York Times, The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, The Journal of American History, Reviews in American History, and many other publications. Kelman has contributed to outreach endeavors aimed at K-12 educators, and to public history projects, including documentary films for the History Channel and PBS’s American Experience series.  He has received many grants and fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library; served on a variety of editorial boards, program and prize committees; and held several administrative posts.  He is now working on a book titled, For Liberty and Empire: How the Civil War Bled into the Indian Wars and editing the journal Reviews in American History.

“Too Soon? Is it Time Already to Consider What the Civil War Sesquicentennial Can Tell Us About Our Past and Present?”

Ari Kelman will discuss the nation’s effort to grapple with the lingering impact of the Civil War around the 150th anniversary of the conflict.

The second lecture, on Friday, is titled “Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Civil War.”

Ari Kelman is Chancellor’s Leadership Professor of History and Faculty Advisor to the Chancellor and Provost at the University of California, Davis.  He is the author, most recently, of Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War (Hill and Wang, 2015), as well as A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Harvard University Press, 2013), recipient of several national awards and honors, including the Bancroft Prize, and A River and Its City:  The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (University of California Press, 2003), which won the Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize.  Kelman’s essays and articles have appeared in Slate, The New York Times, The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, The Journal of American History, Reviews in American History, and many other publications. Kelman has contributed to outreach endeavors aimed at K-12 educators, and to public history projects, including documentary films for the History Channel and PBS’s American Experience series.  He has received many grants and fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library; served on a variety of editorial boards, program and prize committees; and held several administrative posts.  He is now working on a book titled, For Liberty and Empire: How the Civil War Bled into the Indian Wars and editing the journal Reviews in American History.

“Too Soon? Is it Time Already to Consider What the Civil War Sesquicentennial Can Tell Us About Our Past and Present?”

Ari Kelman will discuss the nation’s effort to grapple with the lingering impact of the Civil War around the 150th anniversary of the conflict.

The first lecture, on Thursday, is titled “‘Disunion’: What the Paper of Record Taught Us About the Civil War.”

Ari Kelman is Chancellor’s Leadership Professor of History and Faculty Advisor to the Chancellor and Provost at the University of California, Davis.  He is the author, most recently, of Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War (Hill and Wang, 2015), as well as A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Harvard University Press, 2013), recipient of several national awards and honors, including the Bancroft Prize, and A River and Its City:  The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (University of California Press, 2003), which won the Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize.  Kelman’s essays and articles have appeared in Slate, The New York Times, The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, The Journal of American History, Reviews in American History, and many other publications. Kelman has contributed to outreach endeavors aimed at K-12 educators, and to public history projects, including documentary films for the History Channel and PBS’s American Experience series.  He has received many grants and fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library; served on a variety of editorial boards, program and prize committees; and held several administrative posts.  He is now working on a book titled, For Liberty and Empire: How the Civil War Bled into the Indian Wars and editing the journal Reviews in American History.

“I am Far from Reconstructed”: Jubal A. Early in Exile, 1865–1869

The inaugural Mark and Ann Persun Visiting Scholar Lecture featuring KT Shively, Associate Professor of History, Virginia Commonwealth University.

This lecture is free and open to the public. Sponsored by the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center, Penn State, and the Central Pennsylvania Civil War Roundtable.

Talk Abstract:

Approximately 10,000 former Confederates fled the South following Confederate defeat, including General Jubal A. Early. Early had attracted particular notoriety among Confederate generals for issuing ransom or raze orders when his soldiers invaded the North in 1863 and 1864 and feared he might be hanged for war crimes. From 1865 to 1869, Early traveled to Mexico, the Caribbean, and Canada, reinventing himself from a disgraced Confederate general to a renowned historian of the Civil War. This roundtable talk will explore Early’s itinerant experiences and his influence on the telling of Civil War history, as well as offering a broader look at early Confederate expatriates.

Bio:

Kathryn “KT” Shively is an associate professor of Civil War and Reconstruction history at Virginia Commonwealth University with specialties in early American military, environmental, and medical history. They are the author of Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) and co-editor with Caroline Janney of the forthcoming volume, The Second Manassas Campaign (UNC Press, expected 2025). They also serve as co-PI with Paul Quigley (Virginia Tech) on the NEH-funded public history project, “Experiencing Civil War History Through Augmented Reality: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Environment at Pamplin Historical Park.” Their second monograph, History Wars: Jubal A. Early and the Confederate Origins of Modern American History, is under contract with University of Georgia Press for submission in 2025. Their favorite part of being a Civil War historian is giving battlefield tours, and they spend their non-working hours hosting bluegrass jams, making pies, hiking, and reading with their kid.

This publication is available in alternative media on request. Penn State is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer, and is committed to providing employment opportunities to all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or protected veteran status. Penn State encourages qualified persons with disabilities to participate in its programs and activities. If you anticipate needing any type of accommodation or have questions about the physical access provided, please contact the Richards Center at richardscenter@psu.edu, in advance of your participation or visit.

Dr. Thavolia Glymph, Peabody Family Distinguished Professor of History and Professor of Law at Duke University, will deliver three lectures on “Playing ‘Dixie’ in Egypt: A Transnational Transcript of Race, Nation, Empire and Citizenship,” for the Steven and Janice Brose Distinguished Lecture Series. Taking place on April 18, 19, and 20, the lectures are free and open to the public. This lecture series is sponsored by the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State through the generosity of an endowment by Steven and Janice Brose and cosponsored by the Penn State University Libraries.

The third and final Brose Lecture will be held on Saturday, April 20, at 11:30 a.m., Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library: “Egypt in the American Imaginary and the making of an American Archive of Race and Nation.”

“Playing ‘Dixie’ in Egypt: A Transnational Transcript of Race, Nation, Empire and Citizenship” is a study of white Union and Confederate soldiers who joined the Egyptian army of the Khedive Isma’il after the Civil War. It explores why they left the U.S. to become mercenaries of a foreign army and, more centrally, the part they played in making and transcribing notions of race, citizenship, nation, and empire globally and at home. In Egypt, the American Civil War veterans joined an international force of mercenaries, diplomats, explorers, antiquities seekers, journalists, representatives of geographical societies, arms dealers, and tourists, many of whom, like them, were engaged in the fight against the imagined “horrors of racial equality.” In this work, they had the support of the U.S. government— from the White House to Congress and the U.S. Army—and the applause of their communities. When the last of them returned home, Reconstruction was over, and they could say they had played a part in its overthrow.

Dr. Thavolia Glymph, Peabody Family Distinguished Professor of History and Professor of Law at Duke University, will deliver three lectures on “Playing ‘Dixie’ in Egypt: A Transnational Transcript of Race, Nation, Empire and Citizenship,” for the 2023 Steven and Janice Brose Distinguished Lecture Series. Taking place on April 18, 19, and 20, the lectures are free and open to the public. This lecture series is sponsored by the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State through the generosity of an endowment by Steven and Janice Brose and cosponsored by the Penn State University Libraries.

The second Brose Lecture will be held on Friday, April 19, at 5 p.m., Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library: Playing “Dixie” in the Wilds of Africa.

“Playing ‘Dixie’ in Egypt: A Transnational Transcript of Race, Nation, Empire and Citizenship” is a study of white Union and Confederate soldiers who joined the Egyptian army of the Khedive Isma’il after the Civil War. It explores why they left the U.S. to become mercenaries of a foreign army and, more centrally, the part they played in making and transcribing notions of race, citizenship, nation, and empire globally and at home. In Egypt, the American Civil War veterans joined an international force of mercenaries, diplomats, explorers, antiquities seekers, journalists, representatives of geographical societies, arms dealers, and tourists, many of whom, like them, were engaged in the fight against the imagined “horrors of racial equality.” In this work, they had the support of the U.S. government— from the White House to Congress and the U.S. Army—and the applause of their communities. When the last of them returned home, Reconstruction was over, and they could say they had played a part in its overthrow.

Dr. Thavolia Glymph, Peabody Family Distinguished Professor of History and Professor of Law at Duke University, will deliver three lectures on “Playing ‘Dixie’ in Egypt: A Transnational Transcript of Race, Nation, Empire and Citizenship,” for the Steven and Janice Brose Distinguished Lecture Series. Taking place on April 18, 19, and 20, the lectures are free and open to the public. This lecture series is sponsored by the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State through the generosity of an endowment by Steven and Janice Brose and cosponsored by the Penn State University Libraries.

Dr. Glymph’s lectures are a study of white Union and Confederate soldiers who joined the Egyptian army of the Khedive Isma’il after the Civil War. It explores why they left the U.S. to become mercenaries of a foreign army and, more centrally, the part they played in making and transcribing notions of race, citizenship, nation, and empire globally and at home. In Egypt, the American Civil War veterans joined an international force of mercenaries, diplomats, explorers, antiquities seekers, journalists, representatives of geographical societies, arms dealers, and tourists, many of whom, like them, were engaged in the fight against the imagined “horrors of racial equality.” In this work, they had the support of the U.S. government—from the White House to Congress and the U.S. Army—and the applause of their communities. When the last of them returned home, Reconstruction was over, and they could say they had played a part in its overthrow.

The schedule is as follows:

• Thursday, April 18, at 5 p.m., Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library: “’I am not going into the wilds of Africa’: Race and Nation in the Imagination of U.S. Civil War Veterans in Egypt”
• Friday, April 19, at 5 p.m., Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library: “Playing ‘Dixie’ in the Wilds of Africa”
• Saturday, April 20, at 11:30 a.m., Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library: “Egypt in the American Imaginary and the Making of an American Archive of Race and Nation”

Glymph’s research and teaching explores the history of slavery and plantation economies, the U.S. Civil War, emancipation and Reconstruction. She is the author of the multiple award-winning book, “The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation” (University of North Carolina Press, 2020); and “Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household” (Cambridge University Press, 2008), which won the 2009 Philip Taft Book Prize and was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize. She also co-edited two volumes of the prize-winning documentary series, “Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867,” and has written numerous articles and essays, including the award-winning article “Rose’s War and the Gendered Politics of Slave Insurgency in the Civil War,” which received the George and Ann Richards Prize for the best article published in the Journal of the Civil War Era in 2013.

Glymph is president-elect of the American Historical Association, holder of the 2023-24 Rogers Distinguished Fellowship in Nineteenth Century History at the Huntington Library, and past president of the Southern Historical Association. She is also an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer and an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Antiquarian Society and the Gettysburg Foundation Board of Directors. She has also been a historical consultant to several prominent national museums and historical centers and has also consulted on films such as “Harriet” and “Mercy Street.”

Read more about the Brose Lectures

Dr. Thavolia Glymph, Peabody Family Distinguished Professor of History and Professor of Law at Duke University, will deliver three lectures on “Playing ‘Dixie’ in Egypt: A Transnational Transcript of Race, Nation, Empire and Citizenship,” for the Steven and Janice Brose Distinguished Lecture Series. Taking place on April 18, 19, and 20, the lectures are free and open to the public. This lecture series is sponsored by the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State through the generosity of an endowment by Steven and Janice Brose and cosponsored by the Penn State University Libraries.

The first lecture will be held on Thursday, April 18, at 5 p.m., Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library: “I am not going into the wilds of Africa”: Race and Nation in the Imagination of U.S. Civil War Veterans in Egypt.

“Playing ‘Dixie’ in Egypt: A Transnational Transcript of Race, Nation, Empire and Citizenship” is a study of white Union and Confederate soldiers who joined the Egyptian army of the Khedive Isma’il after the Civil War. It explores why they left the U.S. to become mercenaries of a foreign army and, more centrally, the part they played in making and transcribing notions of race, citizenship, nation, and empire globally and at home. In Egypt, the American Civil War veterans joined an international force of mercenaries, diplomats, explorers, antiquities seekers, journalists, representatives of geographical societies, arms dealers, and tourists, many of whom, like them, were engaged in the fight against the imagined “horrors of racial equality.” In this work, they had the support of the U.S. government— from the White House to Congress and the U.S. Army—and the applause of their communities. When the last of them returned home, Reconstruction was over, and they could say they had played a part in its overthrow.

Digital Pedagogies and Tools with Drs. Jennifer Isasi and Lindsey Chandler from Penn State’s Digital Pedagogies & Initiatives

The Catto-LeCount Fellows Program exposes students to doctoral study in the discipline of history. During this three day program, Pennsylvania State University faculty and staff demystify the graduate school admissions process and educate participants about the academic profession. All expenses including travel, housing, meals, and course materials are provided by the university.

Penn State’s Richards Center, the Department of History, the Latina/o Studies program, and the Department of African American Studies sponsor the program in a collaborative effort to attract and enroll students from underrepresented populations.

This year’s program will be held in-person at Penn State from March 23-25, 2023. Application requirements and details can be found on our Catto-LeCount Fellowship Program page.

The Catto-LeCount Fellows Program exposes students to doctoral study in the discipline of history. During this three day program, Pennsylvania State University faculty and staff demystify the graduate school admissions process and educate participants about the academic profession. All expenses including travel, housing, meals, and course materials are provided by the university.

Penn State’s Richards Center, the Department of History, the Latina/o Studies program, and the Department of African American Studies sponsor the program in a collaborative effort to attract and enroll students from underrepresented populations.

This year’s program will be held in-person at Penn State from March 23-25, 2023. Application requirements and details can be found on our Catto-LeCount Fellowship Program page.

The Catto-LeCount Fellows Program exposes students to doctoral study in the discipline of history. During this three day program, Pennsylvania State University faculty and staff demystify the graduate school admissions process and educate participants about the academic profession. All expenses including travel, housing, meals, and course materials are provided by the university.

Penn State’s Richards Center, the Department of History, the Latina/o Studies program, and the Department of African American Studies sponsor the program in a collaborative effort to attract and enroll students from underrepresented populations.

This year’s program will be held in-person at Penn State from March 23-25, 2023. Application requirements and details can be found on our Catto-LeCount Fellowship Program page.

Professional Development Event #3: Applying for and Tackling Teaching-Heavy Positions with History Department Teaching Professors Jamie Andreson, Sasha Coles, Michael Milligan, and Gregory Peek

Postdoctoral Fellow Manuscript Workshop for Nicole Viglini with Brandi Brimmer, Associate Professor of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Kimberly Welch, Associate Professor of History and Law, Vanderbilt University

Attendance to this event is by invitation only.

Catherine (Cate) Denial, Ph.D. is the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. A distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, Cate won the American Historical Associations’ 2018 Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award. She serves on the board of Commonplace: A Journal of Early American Life and is a past member of the Educational Advisory Committee of the Digital Public Library of America. From 2001 to 2011 Denial served as the Lead Historian for Bringing History Home, a professional development program for K-12 educators funded by $3m from the U.S. Department of Education. Cate’s new book, A Pedagogy of Kindness (due out later this year), argues that higher education needs to get aggressively and determinedly kind. A Pedagogy of Kindness is about attending to justice, believing people, and believing in people. It’s a transformational discipline.

As creator and director of the Bright Institute at Knox College, Cate oversees a program which supports 13 faculty from liberal arts schools across the United States in their teaching and research for three years, while providing them with $10,500 in research funds and convening an annual summer seminar. She is the PI on a $150,000 grant awarded to Knox College by the Mellon Foundation in July 2022, bringing together thirty-six participants from across higher education in the United States to explore “Pedagogies, Communities, and Practices of Care in the Academy After COVID-19.”Cate is also a pedagogical consultant who works with individuals, departments, and institutions in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and Australia.

BY INVITATION ONLY

We were honored to workshop postdoctoral scholar Brooke Thomas’ manuscript “To Capture a Vision Fair:” Black Sorority Women and the Shift From Respectability Politics to Public Policy, 1935-1975.” As part of our workshops for our postdoctoral scholars, we bring in two senior scholars to comment. For Brooke’s workshop, Crystal Sanders, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Emory University, and Stephanie Evans, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies at Georgia State University, joined us.

This workshop featured Kirsten Lee’s dissertation chapter “Archival Values: Feminist Recovery and the Specter of Blackness in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton.” This chapter considers African and Mexican American women’s relation to landholding and gold in the early postbellum period, specifically in writings of Harper and de Burton recovered in the late twentieth century. Kirsten’s entire dissertation, Scenes of Speculation: Abolition and the Movement Literatures of Black North America, 1784-1886, examines how American westward (and failed southward) expansion secured settler citizenship through speculation and other forms converting land theft into capitalist value.

We were so excited to workshop Moyra Williams Eaton’s dissertation chapter, “The Navy’s Systematizers: Surgeons and the Politics of Care in the War of 1812 Era.” Moyra’s chapter looks at the politics and practicalities of Congress and the navy’s efforts to establish a system of naval hospitals for ill and injured sailors between 1810 and the mid-1820’s. Her chapter is drawn from her larger dissertation project entitled “Constructing a ‘Comfortable Harbour’: The United States Naval Asylum and the Systemization of Veterans’ Care in the Nineteenth Century.”

Dr. Michelle Krowl led us through a very informative discussion on how to navigate the Library of Congress website to access digital materials. These digital materials included manuscripts, prints, newspapers and other published materials.

The Richards Center community came together to workshop Dr. Emma Teitelman’s manuscript chapter entitled “Enforcing Property and Territory in Phelps Dodge’s America.” Her paper follows efforts to enforce new relations of property in the timberlands of Georgia and mineral lands of Arizona following a period of social and political reorganization during Reconstruction. It shows how jurisdictional boundaries – between national and sub-national institutions, as well as between different national authorities – became a key object of political struggle as capital traversed and transformed different political spaces. Dr. Teitelman’s book project is currently under contract with Harvard University Press.

Mark Simpson-Vos, Wyndham Robertson Editorial Director at The University of North Carolina Press, joined us for a conversation about writing for and publishing with university presses. Mark answered a variety of questions about the publishing process, including how to engage with editors and how to begin the process of transforming a dissertation into a book.

The Richards Center community workshopped “Writing Compensation out of the Constitution: The Making of Section Four of the Fourteenth Amendment,” a chapter from Dr. Amanda Kleintop’s forthcoming manuscript. Dr. Kleintop’s work examines how the United States was one of the few nations in the nineteenth century that abolished slavery without providing monetary or indirect compensation for the vast majority of enslavers. However, neither US
military victories in the Civil War, moral repugnance for the idea that people could be property, nor the Thirteenth Amendment guaranteed immediate, uncompensated emancipation in the South. Rather, Dr. Kleintop argues that it was the result of a post-war contest where Americans leveraged their understandings of wartime loyalty and slavery’s role in the law and economy to pass the Fourteenth Amendment, whose fourth section prohibited any state or the US from paying “any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave.” This chapter explores the origins and outcomes of section four, arguing that the Congress passed section four and dismissed contentious wartime debates over property rights in people to secure Republican control over Reconstruction and uncompensated emancipation as a legacy of Union victory.

This professional development workshop featured Journal of the Civil War Era editors Kate Masur and Greg Downs. Both professors discussed their experiences as editors of a scholarly journal and took questions from our graduate students, including how to begin the process of submitting an article and how to respond to peer review.

This roundtable featured Dr. Barbara Gannon, who received her PhD at Penn State. Dr. Gannon’s current project focuses on Olustee, which saw the largest Civil War battle in Florida and where Union dead continue to lie in unmarked graves.

The Richards Center community came together to workshop “Union Provost Marshals, Wartime Freedom Seekers, and Military Emancipation in the Civil War,” a section from pre-doctoral fellow Cooper Wingert’s forthcoming dissertation. Cooper’s dissertation explores how wartime freedom seekers and Union army provost marshals navigated civil-military tensions and brokered emancipation in the field, and in the process renegotiated and reinvented federalism in the United States. Provost marshals, the military police of the Civil War Era, were initially tasked with maintaining internal military discipline, but provosts’ careful watch over all civilians who entered and exited army lines put them into daily contact with enslaved people seeking freedom. By looking at the relationship between freedom seekers and Union provosts, his dissertation illuminates how the federal system shaped wartime emancipation, and in turn how the claims of enslaved people and the prerogatives of the Union military reshaped American federalism.

We had a great conversation about how to approach the job market and prepare job talks with our distinguished faculty members, including department head Amy Greenberg, McCabe Greer Professor Christina Snyder, Assistant Professor of African American Studies, History and African Studies J. Marlena Edwards, and Assistant Professor of History Lucien Holness.

A chapter drawn from her dissertation, which examines amnesty as a tool of governance in the United States during the nineteenth century, this manuscript focuses on the use of amnesty as a response to the Whiskey and Fries’s Rebellions in Pennsylvania in the 1790s. In 1794 and again in 1799, citizens of the new United States violently challenged the role and power of the developing federal government by refusing to pay an excise tax on whiskey and a property tax, respectively. State and federal officials sought to reestablish peace in the rebelling areas without sacrificing authority. Despite scholars’ focus on the use of the militia to accomplish these goals, clemency played a pivotal role in restoring order in 1794 and allowed state and federal officials and communities to negotiate the intricacies of constitutional resistance and federal sovereignty. In 1799, John Adams relied on Washington’s precedent of using military force and charging insurgents with treason before also turning to amnesty, despite fierce resistance from other political elites. Exploring the role of amnesty in the Whiskey and Fries’ Rebellions reveals new perspectives on the development of federal sovereignty, the role of the federal judiciary, and the realities of constitutional politics in the Early American Republic.

This workshop is part of the Many Wests book series and will generate a book tentatively titled, Rising Above: Language Revitalization in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, published by the University of Nebraska Press. The workshop is sponsored by the McCabe-Greer Professorship, Department of History, and the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center.

The McCabe Greer Manuscript Workshop with Benjamin Frey will is open by invitation only.

The Cherokee language represents the heart and soul of Cherokee culture. Today, with fewer than 200 first language speakers remaining among the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians’ population of 18,000 citizens, the language is severely endangered. In this talk, Dr. Frey discusses the many driving factors of the language’s endangerment and how to address those factors for an effective program of language revitalization.

Dr. Ben Frey is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. His research focuses on language revitalization and the link between social networks, institutional structures, and language behavior over time.

This talk is part of the Many Wests book series and will generate a book tentatively titled, Rising Above: Language Revitalization in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, published by the University of Nebraska Press. The talk is sponsored by the McCabe-Greer Professorship, Department of History, and the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center.

On Tuesday, April 4th, the Richards Center will welcome Dr. Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr., Assistant Professor of History at Furman University, four our final Lunchtime Talk of the semester. Dr. Pinheiro, Jr. will discuss his process of turning his completed dissertation into multiple publications, including a monograph. In his previous experience, the process of writing publications–articles, books, or blog posts–was not made clear as he navigated the academy. As part of this conversation, Dr. Pinheiro, Jr., will discuss his experiences negotiating with presses–academic and trade–in the hopes of providing transparency to graduate students and fellows. He also welcomes attendees to come with their own questions that he, to the best of his ability, will address.

This event is open to Richards Center affiliated graduate students, pre-docs, post-docs, and faculty. 

On Monday, April 3rd, the Richards Center and the Penn State Department of History will host Dr. Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr., Assistant Professor of History at Furman University, for a book talk in Foster Auditorium. Dr. Pinheiro will discuss his book, The Families’ Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice, recently published in the University of Georgia Press UnCivil Wars Series.

Dr. Pinheiro’s research focuses on the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in the military from 1850 through the 1920s. Counter to the national narrative which championed the patriotic manhood of soldiering from the Civil War through the 1920s, his research reveals that African American veterans and their families’ military experience were much more fraught. Economic and social instability introduced by military service resonated for years and even generations after soldiers left the battlefield. He has published articles in edited volumes and academic journals, in and outside of the United States. His manuscript, The Families’ Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice, (with The University of Georgia Press in the UnCivil Wars Series) highlights how racism, in and outside of military service, impacted the bodies, economies, family structures, and social spaces of African Americans long after the war ended. His book has received rave reviews in the LA Review of Books and the Civil War Book Review. It received an honorable mention, in the Civil War Monitor, for the best Civil War book of 2022.

This event is sponsored by the Department of History, Latin American Studies, and the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center and is free and open to the public.

The Catto-LeCount Fellows Program for Equity and Inclusion exposes students to doctoral study in the discipline of history. During this three-day virtual program, Pennsylvania State University faculty and staff demystify the graduate school admissions process and educate participants about the academic profession. All expenses including course materials are provided by the university. Students also will receive a $250 stipend upon completion of the program. Penn State’s Richards Center, the Department of History, the Latina/o Studies program, and the Department of African American Studies sponsor the program in a collaborative effort to attract and enroll students from underrepresented populations.

This year’s program will be held virtually from March 23-25, 2023. Application requirements and details can be found on our Catto-LeCount Fellowship Program page.

On Thursday, March 23, 2023, historian Peniel E. Joseph will speak about the ideas in his recent book, The Third Reconstruction, which offers a powerful and personal new interpretation of recent history. The racial reckoning that unfolded in 2020, he argues, marked the climax of a Third Reconstruction: a new struggle for citizenship and dignity for Black Americans, just as momentous as the movements that arose after the Civil War and during the civil rights era.

Joseph draws revealing connections and insights across centuries as he traces this Third Reconstruction from the election of Barack Obama to the rise of Black Lives Matter to the failed assault on the Capitol. Joseph is based at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the following titles: Associate Dean for Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion; Professor of Public Affairs; Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values; Founding Director, Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. 

This event is sponsored by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy and the Richards Civil War Era Center, and is free and open to the public.

Kathleen M. Brown, David Boies Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, will deliver a closing keynote address for the Symposium on Free State Slavery entitled “Encumbering Liberty in the Shadow of Slavery” on Friday, March 17th in Weaver 102. This event is free and open to the public.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Brown is a faculty affiliate of Africana Studies, the History and Sociology of Science, the Center for Research on Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, and the lead faculty historian on the Penn & Slavery Project. Brown’s research focuses on intersectional questions of race, gender, sexuality, and labor in colonial North American, Atlantic, and early U.S. contexts. She is the author of two prize-winning books, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996) and Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (2009). Her most recent book, Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition (February 2023, University of Pennsylvania Press), considers how the campaign to end slavery entangled activists in a complex process of undoing longstanding practices and habits of the body central to that institution.

This symposium undertakes a consideration of the question of slavery in the so-called “Free States,” presenting cutting-edge scholarship by senior, mid-career, and early career scholars. Our authors cover a range of jurisdictions across the expanding United States, using a variety of methodological tools and offering a wide breadth of theoretical insights. Each paper will focus on the symposium theme of slavery and bound labor in jurisdictions that ostensibly banned the practice. Our authors probe their topics from several different angles, and the symposium as a whole reveals both the diversity in regimes and experiences of unfree labor as well as overlaps between the forms of unfreedom African and Native Americans experienced before 1865. In addition to workshops for the pre-circulated papers, this symposium will include two keynote addresses that are open to the public.

The Symposium on Free State Slavery is organized by Kellen Heniford, Richards Center Postdoctoral Scholar; Kathleen M. Brown, David Boies Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania; and Sarah Barringer Gordon, Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.

Schedule of Events

Thursday, March 16, Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library

4:45pm-5:45 pm., Opening Keynote Address

• Andrew Diemer, Towson University, “The Underground Railroad and the Struggle for the ‘Free’ State of Pennsylvania”

Friday, March 17, 102 Weaver Building 

Registration for lunch and to receive the pre-circulated papers is required by March 10. Please email Barby Singer at bqs6@psu.edu to register.

9:00 am-12:50 pm, Workshop Papers

9:00am-10:10am, Richard Newman, Rochester Institute of Technology, “Making and Breaking Free State Slavery in New York”

10:10am-10:20am, Break

10:20am-11:30am, Lucien Holness, Virginia Tech, “The Colonial Legacy of Western New York and Southwestern Pennsylvania in the Making of Abolition”

11:30am-11:40am, Break

11:40am-12:50pm, Sarah Barringer Gordon, University of Pennsylvania, “Unlikely Freedom: Slavery, Race, and Law in Antebellum California”

12:50-1:40pm, Lunch

1:40-4:10 pm, Workshop Papers

1:40pm-2:50pm, Mycah Conner, Penn State, “’Damnable Revelation’: Connivance, Counternarratives, and the Wartime Meaning of Free Soil Illinois”

2:50pm-3:00pm, Break

3:00pm-4:10pm, Cory James Young, University of Nebraska – Lincoln, “Hereditary Term Slavery and the Pursuit of Restitution in Antebellum Pennsylvania”

4:15-5:15 pm, Closing Keynote Address

• Kathleen M. Brown, University of Pennsylvania, “Encumbering Liberty in the Shadow of Slavery”

Andrew Diemer, Associate Professor of History at Towson University, will deliver the opening keynote address for the Symposium on Free State Slavery entitled “The Underground Railroad and the Struggle for the ‘Free’ State of Pennsylvania” on Thursday, March 16th in Foster Auditorium. This event is free and open to the public.

Diemer has taught at Towson University since 2011. He received his PhD from Temple University and is the author of The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-Atlantic Borderland, 1817-1863 (Georgia, 2016) and Vigilance: The Life of William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad (Knopf, 2022).

On Friday, February 24th, we will host a hybrid manuscript workshop featuring a dissertation chapter by Edward Green, the 2022-2023 Richards Center Center and Institute Fellow. Those interested in participating should read the pre-circulated paper beforehand and be willing to participate in a constructive conversation. This event is open to Richards Center affiliated graduate students, pre-docs, post docs, and faculty.