Month / January 2025

by emoryhistorydept

Crespino, Jimmy Carter Professor of History, Remembers Life and Legacy of Former President

Members of Joe Crespino’s “Carter Presidency” seminar course visiting Jimmy Carter’s Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, in 2018.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter died on December 29, 2024, at the age of 100. Dr. Joseph Crespino, Senior Associate Dean of Faculty and Divisional Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Jimmy Carter Professor of History, has helped to shape of popular understandings of Carter’s life and legacy, including in the days since his passing. Carter nurtured a “unique collaboration” with Emory University, which included regular end-of-term visits to Crespino’s “Carter Presidency” seminar course. Crespino was named the first Jimmy Carter Professor in 2014. View a presentation Crespino recently gave about Carter’s legacy, along with a list of recent articles from, and media citations of, Crespino focused on the former president.

by emoryhistorydept

Sanders Chronicles the Impacts of “Segregation Scholarships”

Dr. Crystal R. Sanders, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently published A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs with UNC Press. The book chronicles the little-known history of “segregation scholarships,” a pre–Brown v. Board of Education practice wherein southern states paid to send Black students out of state for graduate education instead of creating separate but equal graduate programs at tax-supported Black colleges or by admitting Black students to historically white institutions. A finalist for the 2025 Association for the Study of African American Life and History Book Prize, A Forgotten Migration was also the focus of a recent piece in Forbes. Read an excerpt from that piece, in which Sanders explains the genesis of the project, along with the full article: “A History Of ‘Segregation Scholarships’ And The Impact On HBCUs.”

“Growing up in rural North Carolina, I noticed that many of the retired Black public school teachers in my church had master’s degrees from NYU and Columbia University’s Teachers College. Quick math let me know that they had earned these degrees in the late 1940s and early 1950s. I asked my father why these women had chosen to go so far away for graduate school and he answered my question with a question: ‘Did they really have a choice?’” Sanders elaborated, “My dad’s comments stayed with me and I began exploring the credentials of Black public school teachers in the decades before desegregation and realized that Black teachers all over the South seemed to have these degrees from northeastern and midwest institutions.”

by emoryhistorydept

LaChance Appraises Biden’s Push to End Federal Executions

Dr. Daniel LaChance, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow in Law and the Humanities and Associate Professor of History, was quoted in a mid-December 2024 U.S. News & World Report article about whether President Biden would seek to commute the sentences of remaining prisoners on federal death row. A week after that article, the Biden administration announced that 37 of those 40 prisoners would have their sentences reclassified to life without parole.

LaChance is a legal scholar working at the intersection of American legal and cultural history, criminology, and literary studies. His books include Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and Crimesploitation (Stanford University Press, 2022), co-authored with Paul Kaplan. Read an excerpt from the U.S. News & World Report article below along with the full piece here: “Biden Made a Promise to End the Federal Death Penalty. Will He Bend to Pressure to Empty Death Row?“

“He’s very much made the death penalty a symbol of what he represents,” Daniel LaChance, an associate professor at Emory University who wrote the book “Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States,” says of Trump.

“It’s pretty shrewd on his part because we know that support for the death penalty is concentrated amongst white Protestant Republicans – a key and core part of his base,” LaChance says.

Overall, about 53% of Americans support the death penalty for someone convicted of murder, according to polling from Gallup. Support for the death penalty for a convicted murderer has been trending down in recent decades after reaching a historic high of 80% in 1994, according to Gallup.

by emoryhistorydept

Graduate Student Ashley Tan Researches Jewish Communities in East and Southeast Asia

In the summer of 2024, History PhD student Ashley Tan received funding from Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies to conduct research on Jewish communities in East and Southeast Asia. He wrote a reflection on his summer experience, which includes a fascinating discussion of his search for a centuries-old Kaifeng Jewish community, in a piece for the Tam Institute’s website.

In parallel to his history coursework, Tan is working towards a Jewish Studies Graduate Certificate. He is also a Brickman-Levin Fellow of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, Young NUS Fellow of the National University of Singapore, and a Yenching Scholar of the Yenching Academy of Peking University. Tonio Andrade, Professor of History, serves as Tan’s advisor.

Read an excerpt from the Tam Institute piece below along with the full reflection.

“With the help from the Tam Institute’s research grants, I have had the chance to visit and conduct research on a number of different Jewish communities in East and Southeast Asia. The community that I will be focusing on in this article is one that is relatively more well-known but has largely faded into obscurity in recent years: the Kaifeng Jews. Although I have seen mentions of this community in passing when I read scholarship about Jewish history or when I visited different Jewish museums, detailed information about this community, especially regarding its recent history, is quite scanty. This puzzled me as the Kaifeng Jewish community is one of the oldest Jewish communities in Asia, dating back at least to the Song dynasty that existed around 1000 years ago when Kaifeng was the imperial capital, so I knew I had to go see it for myself.“