National Archives at Atlanta Presents Day-Long Civil War Program April 16, 2011

/PRNewswire/ -- The National Archives at Atlanta will present The Civil War: America's Long Struggle on April 16, 2011, at its Morrow, GA, facility, located at 5780 Jonesboro Road. The program, which costs $20.00, including lunch, is open to the public, pre-registration required.

This day-long program commemorating the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, features lectures from leading Civil War scholars and archivists, an exhibition of original 19th century newspapers chronicling the African-American experience, and an opportunity for attendees to learn more about their own Civil War heirlooms.

"The symposium will attract Civil War historians, as well as members of the general public whose lives were forever impacted by this great conflict," said Jim McSweeney, Regional Administrator, National Archives at Atlanta.

"It's one thing to hear about the Civil War in a lecture or read about it in books. It's another to dig through your attic and find your family's place in the greater narrative."

Speakers include:

* David S. Ferriero, Archivist of the United States
* Trevor Plante, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
* Shane Bell, National Archives at Atlanta
* Daniel Stowell, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum
* Eric Leonard, Andersonville National Historic Site
* Kenneth Noe, author of Reluctant Rebels and Auburn University professor


Slavery and Freedom in Black and White: The African American Experience in 19th Century Newspapers, an exhibition of original newspapers, features articles on African American history, including editions of Harper's Weekly, The Globe, The Liberator, and Savannah Daily Herald, drawn from the private collection of Christine Mitchell. The exhibit will remain on display through September 2011.

One hundred registrants will have the opportunity to display their Civil War artifacts and heirlooms and learn more about the significance of the objects from experts in an afternoon program entitled "Civil War Treasures in Your Nation's Attic." Georgia Public Broadcasting will film some of these objects for a program by the same name to air on a future date. This portion of the program is sponsored by the Foundation for the National Archives, Scott Antique Markets, the National Archives at Atlanta, and Georgia Public Broadcasting. Objects must be pre-approved. See the registration form for more details.

Registration begins today and is $20 per person, which includes a catered lunch. For more program information and to register, go to www.archives.gov/southeast.

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Stanford Researcher Spotlights Antebellum Artists Who Protested Slavery

What Does One Do When Confronting the Biggest Social Evil of One's Time? In the Case of a Few Artists in the Decades Prior to the Civil War, They Lifted Their Pens and Paintbrushes

(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Rhonda Goodman, a Stanford doctoral student in art and art history and a Geballe Dissertation Prize Fellow at the Humanities Center, has studied the little-known artwork for messages that reveal the social and political attitudes of the time. She focused her research on the way artists portrayed slave auctions, in particular.

The "sentimental culture" in the decades prior to the Civil War was a time when artists and writers "used their works to elicit a certain type of feeling and engender sympathy," said Goodman, a former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter. Significantly, the most popular book of the 19th century, after the Bible, was Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Here's a case in point: On the morning of March 3, 1853, the little-known English painter Eyre Crowe, who traveled America with author William Makepeace Thackeray, saw an advertisement in Richmond, Va., for a slave auction: "Fifteen likely negroes to be disposed of between half-past nine and twelve—five men, six women, two boys, and two girls."

Although engrossed in his sketching, he attracted attention. No one would bid. The auctioneer finally confronted the artist and asked him how he would like it if someone interrupted his business. As Crowe recalled in his memoir, With Thackeray in America: "This was unanswerable; I got up with the intention of leaving quietly, but, feeling this would savour of flight, I turned round to the now evidently angry crowd of dealers, and said 'You may turn me away, but I can recollect all I have seen.'"

Crowe left the "stifling atmosphere of human traffic," but he remembered what he saw somewhat differently than what he portrayed in the sketch he made on the spot, which was eventually published in the Illustrated London News in 1856. Crowe "Europeanized" the slaves' physiognomy to reduce the sense of otherness for white viewers, as these artists typically did, Goodman said.

In the finished painting, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1861, the group of people are no longer docile and waiting. The women are tense and anxious. In the sketch, it's not clear if the man to the right is part of a family group. But in the painting, the association is unmistakable. He is anguished and unresigned—"angry, because he cannot defend his family," Goodman said.

The painting "reminds us that this is a perverse situation; they may be sold apart," Goodman added.

Crowe's strategy worked: His painting got the right kind of attention. Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia, was discussed in The Times, the Athenaeum, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and Art Journal; the last called it "one of the most important pictures in the exhibition" and wrote, "The appalling guilt of that accursed system was never more successfully depicted"—important and timely, since Britain was arming the South and barely able to keep an official neutrality because of its dependence on cotton.

Was Crowe fulfilling the threat of his exit line, recollecting what he didn't dare sketch in front of the angry dealers? Or was he altering his sketch to make a political statement, a visual equivalent to Uncle Tom's Cabin?

We'll never know for sure. In any case, he wasn't alone. In Thomas Satterwhite Noble's Price of Blood (its title taken from Uncle Tom's Cabin, in which a character describes money earned from the sale of children by their master and father as "the price of their blood"), a plantation owner sells his barefoot mulatto son, who looks away from him; their faces differ only by age and the color of their skin.

Noble was a Southerner who fought for his states' rights, though he loathed slavery. He made a series of paintings depicting its horrors after the war, as the nation faced a new set of race issues. No one knows who painted the unsigned Slave Auction (circa 1850), now owned by the Carnegie Museum of Art. Did the artist wish to avoid controversy through anonymity? In the painting, a woman so pale "she may be an octoroon" is dressed like a bride and being led into a group of men who are appraising her, Goodman said. Perhaps she is being sold into concubinage. In the foreground, a man is raising a weapon, threatening violence, and a nearly naked baby lies beneath him in the foreground. The scene recalls the Massacre of the Innocents, but the mother doesn't seem to notice; she is clinging to an older child who is being examined by a dealer.

Who bought these paintings? "Nobody did," Goodman said. In some cases, they didn't even try: Goodman said the more gruesome art of the period prior to 1820—of slaves being branded or whipped, for example—was not made for sale or exhibition at all.

But these artists hoped for a market. After the execution of radical abolitionist John Brown on Dec. 2, 1859, sculptor John Rogers failed to find a buyer for his Slave Auction (1859), a group of figures in plaster. "I find the times have quite headed me off," he wrote in a Christmas Eve letter, "for The Slave Auction tells such a strong story that none of the stores will receive it to sell for fear of offending their Southern customers."

Instead, Goodman said, he commissioned a black man to find a buyer by trying to sell the painting door-to-door on the streets of New York. It sold.

"Part of what is so important about Rhonda's work is its interdisciplinary scope—the way she brings together cultural history, the history of race, visual arts and material culture," said Bryan Wolf, the Jeanette and William Hayden Jones Professor in American Art and Culture and Goodman's dissertation adviser. "She's showing how the issues surrounding slavery permeated virtually every aspect of antebellum life, and she's also showing, through the example of a painter like Crowe, how ways of thinking—like sentimentalism, which was so important to middle-class culture at the time—were mobilized in the service of the antislavery cause."


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Presentation Focuses on Lost Stories of Slaves

Douglas A. Blackmon, the Wall Street Journal Atlanta Bureau Chief, will give a presentation on his groundbreaking book, “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II,” which broadly examines how a form of neoslavery thrived in the U.S. long after legal abolition. The lecture is planned for February 12, 2009, 4:00 to 6:00PM in the Georgia Tech Library’s Ferst Room.

"Slavery by Another Name” unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude. It also reveals te stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the modern comapnies that profited most from neoslavery, and the system’s final demise in the 1940s.

The program is free and open to the public, however, interested parties are encouraged to R.S.V.P. the event by e-mailing Steven Henderson: steven.henderson@ht.gatech.edu.

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Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database Debuts at Emory

/PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A group of international scholars will gather at Emory Dec. 5-6 to celebrate the debut of "Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database" (www.slavevoyages.org) as it begins its own maiden expedition.

Two years in the making at Emory, the free and interactive Web-based resource documents the slave trade from Africa to the New World between the 16th and 19th centuries, says David Eltis, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History and one of the scholars who originally published "The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade" as a CD-ROM in 1999. He and Martin Halbert, director of digital innovations for Emory Libraries, directed the work that made the online "Voyages" project expandable, interactive and publicly accessible.

"'Voyages' provides searchable information on almost 35,000 trans-Atlantic voyages hauling human cargo, as well as maps, images and data on some individual Africans transported," says Eltis.

The conference, which also marks the bicentennial of the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808, will feature presentations by Eltis' graduate students who have worked on the database, with leading scholars commenting on their papers. Other sessions include "The Slave Trade, the Web site and Atlantic History" and "The Slave Trade, the Website and the Classroom."

David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus and founding director emeritus of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University, will give a keynote lecture on "Comparing the Paths to American and British Slave-Trade Abolition." Following Davis' talk will be the formal launch of the "Voyages" database by Rick Luce, director of University Libraries. For more information on the conference, visit www.ias.emory.edu/events/SlaveTradeConference.pdf.

Database Establishes Links Between America, Africa

Funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Harvard University's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, "Voyages" is based on the seminal 1999 work, "The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade." That CD-ROM included more than 27,000 slave trade voyages and has been popular with scholars and genealogists alike. However, it is no longer available and had several limitations.

"Everyone wants to know where their ancestors came from," Eltis says. "There are more data on the slave trade than on the free migrant movement simply because the slave trade was a business and people were property, so records were likely to be better. What the database makes possible is the establishment of links between America and Africa in a way that already has been done by historians for Europeans."

Adds Halbert: "The digital and Web-based Voyages publication is intentionally collaborative and can grow and change over time. Scholars who discover new information can add it to the database, and thus share it with their colleagues. In addition, researchers can download the database in a format compatible with the SPSS statistical package."

Slave Trade Database in the Classroom

Halbert, Eltis and their team also collaborated with educators from public and private middle and high schools to create lessons plans and other materials, so that K-12 teachers can take "Voyages" into their classrooms. These and other resources on the site, such as images, introductory maps and essays, help visitors appreciate the reality of the slave trade, says project manager Liz Milewicz.

Henry Louis Gates, the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University and writer/producer of the PBS documentary "African American Lives," credits "Voyages" with shedding an important light on the hidden history of 12.5 million slaves.

"The greatest mystery in the history of the West, I believe, has always been the Africans who were enslaved and shipped to the New World," he said. "Their ancestries, their identities, their stories were lost in the ships that carried them across the Atlantic. The multi-decade and collaborative project that brought us [the Voyages] site has done more to reverse the Middle Passage than any other single act of scholarship possibly could."


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Princeton Professor to Speak on Marriage and Slavery in Lecture at UGA

Tera W. Hunter, Franklin Visiting Scholar and professor of history and African-American studies at Princeton University, will deliver a lecture titled “Until Death or Distance Do You Part: Marriage and Slavery in the Nineteenth Century” on Thursday, Nov. 6, at 4 p.m. in the University of Georgia Chapel.

The lecture is open free to the public. It is part of the History Graduate Student Association Lecture Series.

Hunter’s research interests include the history of slavery and freedom, gender, the South and labor. Her forthcoming book is entitled “Until Death or Distance Do You Part”: Marriage and Slavery in the Nineteenth Century. Hunter’s first book: To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 1997) received several prizes including the H. L. Mitchell Award from the Southern Historical Association.

The event is sponsored by the Franklin College Office of Inclusion and Diversity Leadership, the Willson Center for the Humanities and Arts, the department of history, Institute for Women’s Studies, Southern Historical Association, Institute for African American Studies and the History Graduate Student Association.

A book signing will follow the lecture.

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