Still Time to Register for the Historical Society Conference in DC

Randall Stephens

Eric Arnesen, George Washington University, has put together a terrific program for the Historical Society Conference next week at GWU's Marvin Center. And, there is still time to register for "Historical Inquiry in the New Century," at a reduced rate, if you have not already done so.

The conference will feature panels on a variety of topics, ranging from high school history teaching, historians as expert witnesses, and military history to gender, religion in modern Britain, and the Medieval West (you can read some of those papers now on-line). The conference has a number of sessions devoted to labor history and African-American history. The latter includes:

THURSDAY, JUNE 3

1:00-2:30

Session ID: SLAVERY, HISTORY, AND THE FUTURE: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Room 309

Chair: Robert Cottrol, George Washington University School of Law

Karlee-Anne Sapoznik, York University
"‘They Say That It's Culture, but It's Abuse’: Slavery and Servile Marriage in Historical and Contemporary Perspective”

Jeffrey Gunn, York University
"Evolving History in the 21st Century: The Paramount Role of Autobiography and Biography in Linking Historical and Contemporary Issues"

2:45-4:15pm

Session IID: DOES IT TAKE A SMALL WINDOW TO SEE THE BIG PICTURE?
Room 309

Chair: Melvin Patrick Ely, College of William and Mary

Melvin Patrick Ely
"What Reviewers Should Have Criticized about Israel on the Appomattox, But Didn't"

Nancy A. Hillman, College of William and Mary, "Drawn Together, Drawn Apart: Biracial Fellowship and Black Leadership in Virginia Baptist Churches Before and After Nat Turner"

Jennifer R. Loux, Library of Virginia, "How Proslavery Southerners Became Emancipationists: Slavery and Regional Identity in Frederick County, Maryland"

Ted Maris-Wolf, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
"Self-Enslavement in Virginia, 1856-1864: How Two Free Black Men Shaped a Law That Fueled the National Debate Over Slavery"

Comment: Melvin Patrick Ely

FRIDAY, JUNE 4

8:30-10:00am

Session IA: CIVIL RIGHTS AND THE BACKLASH
Room 301

Chair: Sonya Michel, Woodrow Wilson Center

Jerald Podair, Lawrence University, “‘One City, One Standard’: The Struggle for Equality in Rudolph Giuliani's New York”

Brett Gadsden, Emory University, “Refiguring White Backlash: Joseph Biden and the Liberal Retreat from School Desegregation”

Clarence Taylor, Baruch College, “The New York City Teacher's Union and Civil Rights”

Comment: Sonya Michel

10:15-11:45am

Session IIA: RETHINKING EMANCIPATION
Room 301

Chair: Alex Lichtenstein, Florida International University

James Oakes, CUNY Graduate Center
"Rethinking Emancipation"

Comment: Alex Lichtenstein

Comment: Chandra Manning, Georgetown University

2:45-4:15pm

Session IVA: STATE OF THE FIELD: TWENTIETH-CENTURY AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY
Room 301

Chair: Adele Alexander, George Washington University

Daniel Letwin, Pennsylvania State University, "Black Political Thought in the Age of the New Negro"

Carol Anderson, Emory University, "Freedom Fighters on the Cold War Plantation: The Histories of African Americans' Anticolonialism"

Mary Ellen Curtin, University of Essex, "Race, Gender, and American Politics since 1965"

4:30-6:00pm

Session VA: "THE LONG CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT": A ROUNDTABLE
Room 301

Chair: Eric Arnesen, George Washington University

Patricia Sullivan, University of South Carolina

J. Mills Thornton, University of Michigan

Beth Bates, Wayne State University

Robert Korstad, Duke University

James Leloudis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

SATURDAY, JUNE 5

8:30-10:00am

Session IE: RACE, POLITICS, PROSTITUTION, AND THE COLLAPSE OF RECONSTRUCTION IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH
Room 413-14

Chair: Leslie Rowland, University of Maryland

Emily Landau, University of Maryland, “Public Rights and Public Women: Plessy, Prostitution, and the Effects of Reconstruction’s Demise in New Orleans 1862-1896”

Michael A. Ross, University of Maryland, “Creole Icarus: Jean Baptiste Jourdain and the Rise and Fall of Reconstruction in New Orleans”

Comment: John Rodrigue, Stonehill College

10:15-11:45am

Session IIA: NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE HISTORY OF CIVIL RIGHTS AND RACE IN THE U.S., I
Room 301

Chair: James Miller, George Washington University

Thomas Guglielmo, George Washington University, “Raising a Black and ‘So-Called White’ Military: Race-Making and America's World War II Draft”

Touré Reed, Illinois State University, “The Urban League in the New Deal Era”

Yevette Richards Jordan, George Mason University, “George McCray and the Shifting Dimensions of a Transnational Black Identity in Newly Independent Ghana”

1:00-2:30pm

Session IIIA: NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE HISTORY OF CIVIL RIGHTS AND RACE IN THE U.S., II
Room 301

Chair: David Chappell, University of Oklahoma

Kevin Gerard Boyle, Ohio State University, “Redemption: Civil Rights, History, and the Promise of America”

Joseph Kip Kosek, George Washington University, “‘Who Is Their God?’: Religion and the Civil Rights Movement”

Sophia Z. Lee, Yale University, “Without the Intervention of Lawyers’: Race, Labor, and Conservative Politics in 1950s America”

Comment: David Chappell

2:45-4:15pm

Session IVB: RACE AND LABOR IN THE CONTEMPORARY SOUTH
Room 307

Chair: Robert H. Zieger, University of Florida

Jane Berger, Cornell University, "'A Lot Closer To What It Ought To Be': Black Women and Public-Sector Employment in Baltimore, 1950-1975"

Rob Chase, Case Western Reserve University, "Slaves of the State Revolt: Southern Prison Labor and a Prison-Made Civil Rights Movement, 1960-1980"

Michael Dennis, Acadia University, "The Virginia Organizing Project and the Movement for Economic Democracy"

Comment: Robert H. Zieger

Session IVD: TRADITIONS, REVISIONS, AND PUBLIC THEOLOGIES IN AFRICAN AMERICA
Room 309

Chair: Richard S. Newman, Rochester Institute of Technology

David Waldstreicher, Temple University, "Phillis Wheatley, Religion, and the American Revolutionaries"

Jacqueline Robinson, St. Joseph's University, “A Halfway Covenant for Harlem: The Public Theology of William Lloyd Imes”

Comment: Richard S. Newman

Session IVE: NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE STUDY OF RACE AND SLAVERY
Room 413-14

Chair: Mark Smith, University of South Carolina

Joyce Malcolm, George Mason University School of Law, “Slavery in 18th-Century Massachusetts and the American Revolution”

Robert Cottrol, George Washington School of Law, “Race-Based Slavery and Race-Based Citizenship: How Brazil and the United States Became Different”

Amy Long Caffee, University of South Carolina, “Hearing Africa: Early Modern Europeans’ Auditory Perceptions of the African Other”

4:30-6:00pm

Session VA: NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE HISTORY OF CIVIL RIGHTS AND RACE IN THE U.S., III
Room 301

Chair: Steven Reich, James Madison University

James Ralph, Middlebury College, “‘It is an Eternal Struggle’: The Pursuit of Civil Rights in the Land of Lincoln”

James D. Wolfinger, DePaul University, “‘The American Ideals of Justice and Equality’: The African-American Fight for Equal Rights in Levittown”

Kenneth Mack, Harvard Law School, “Race, Representation, and the Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer”