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The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and The Council of
Independent Colleges
Announce a Seminar for Historians
The Slavery Debates: Problems in Slavery Studies Today
June 2-7, 2002, Columbia University
Nomination Deadline: Friday, March 29, 2002
The Slavery Debates: Problems in Slavery Studies Today
Led by Professor David Brion Davis
The Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) and the Gilder Lehrman Institute
of American History are pleased to offer an unusual opportunity open only
to faculty members in American history and related fields at CIC member
institutions. This week-long seminar will explore the latest issues in
slavery studies.
The goal of this inaugural Gilder Lehrman/CIC seminar is to offer CIC
history faculty members an opportunity to study with and to exchange ideas
with one of the most renowned scholars of slavery in the world, David
Brion Davis, Sterling Professor Emeritus at Yale and director of the Gilder
Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Winner
of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, the National Book Award for History
and Biography, the Bancroft Prize, and numerous others, Professor Davis
has just published In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our
Heritage of Slavery (Yale University Press).
Professor Davis’s seminar will include lectures and discussion groups,
a guest lecture on slavery in the Caribbean by Professor Orlando Patterson
(John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University), and visits
to scholarly archives at the New York Historical Society and the Gilder
Lehrman Collection, on deposit at the Morgan Library in New York City.
Participants will also have a chance to visit “history high schools”
in New York, special high schools where American history is part of the
curriculum each day for four years.
The seminar will examine the major scholarly works and turning points
in the debates over slavery from the time of Ulrich B. Phillips to Eric
Williams, Kenneth Stampp, Stanley Elkins, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman,
Eugene Genovese, David Brion Davis, Robin Blackburn, and on to Ira Berlin
and David Eltis. Professor Davis will prepare a reader for seminar participants
consisting of brief selections from some of these classic books on slavery.
For the first six decades of the 20th century, racial slavery was regarded
as a footnote in American history, a minor branch of the “history
of the South.” This was largely the result of the failure of Reconstruction
following the Civil War, as well as the fact that Jim Crow segregation
and Southern white supremacy became the terrible price the nation paid
for sectional reunion and reconciliation.
The last forty-odd years have changed all that. From the time of the
first stirrings of the Civil Rights Movement, historians and economists
have written thousands of books and articles that reexamine and illuminate
the absolutely central place of the Atlantic slave trade and plantation
slavery in the history of the entire New World. They have also rediscovered
the radical, biracial, and transatlantic character of antislavery movements.
Even the public at large has evidenced a remarkable upsurge of interest
in these subjects, especially in the 1970s and from the early 1990s to
the present.
Yet most college graduates and even many faculty members in the humanities
and social sciences are unfamiliar with the debates over slavery that
have raged among specialists, to say nothing of spectacular new discoveries
concerning the size and destinations of the slave trade, slave culture
and resistance, changes in Western culture that made antislavery a possibility,
and the differences between slaveholding regimes in New England, the Chesapeake,
Carolina, Barbados, Jamaica, and Brazil.
Click here
to view the Gilder Lehrman History Seminar Announcement. (This
is a PDF file. In order to view properly,
the minimum software requirement is version 4.0. Adobe Acrobat is available
for free from the Adobe
Web site.)
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