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Tom Chaffin (PhD, ’95) Publishes ‘Odyssey: Young Charles Darwin, The Beagle, and The Voyage that Changed the World’

Tom Chaffin, a 1995 graduate of the doctoral program, has just published Odyssey: Young Charles Darwin, The Beagle, and The Voyage that Changed the World. Chaffin’s eighth book, Odyssey offers a glimpse into the often overlooked aspects of Charles Darwin’s five-year travels aboard the HMS Beagle and on land from the Americas to South Africa and Australia. An excerpt of the book was recently printed in Lapham’s Quarterly under the title, “A Disgrace to His Family: Meet Charles Darwin, somewhat aimless student and excellent beetle hunter.” Read a description of the book below and find out more information here.

Charles Darwin—alongside Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein—ranks among the world’s most famous scientists. In popular imagination, he peers at us from behind a bushy white Old Testament beard. This image of Darwin the Sage, however, crowds out the vital younger man whose curiosities, risk-taking, and travels aboard HMS Beagle would shape his later theories and served as the foundation of his scientific breakthroughs.

Though storied, the Beagle‘s voyage is frequently misunderstood, its mission and geographical breadth unacknowledged. The voyage’s activities associated with South America—particularly its stop in the Galapagos archipelago, off Ecuador’s coast—eclipse the fact that the Beagle, sailing in Atlantic, Pacific and Indian ocean waters, also circumnavigated the globe.

Mere happenstance placed Darwin aboard the Beagle—an invitation to sail as a conversation companion on natural-history topics for the ship’s depression-prone captain. Darwin was only twenty-two years old, an unproven, unknown, aspiring geologist when the ship embarked on what stretched into its five-year voyage. Moreover, conducting marine surveys of distance ports and coasts, the Beagle‘s purposes were only inadvertently scientific. And with no formal shipboard duties or rank, Darwin, after arranging to meet the Beagle at another port, often left the ship to conduct overland excursions.

Those outings, lasting weeks, even months, took him across mountains, pampas, rainforests, and deserts. An expert horseman and marksman, he won the admiration of gauchos he encountered along the way. Yet another rarely acknowledged aspect of Darwin’s Beagle travels, he also visited, often lingered in, cities—including Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Valparaiso, Santiago, Lima, Sydney, and Cape Town; and left colorful, often sharply opinionated, descriptions of them and his interactions with their residents. In the end, Darwin spent three-fifths of his five-year “voyage” on land—three years and three months on terra firma versus a total 533 days on water.

Acclaimed historian Tom Chaffin reveals young Darwin in all his complexities—the brashness that came from his privileged background, the Faustian bargain he made with Argentina’s notorious caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas, his abhorrence of slavery, and his ambition to carve himself a place amongst his era’s celebrated travelers and intellectual giants. Drawing on a rich array of sources— in a telling of an epic story that surpasses in breadth and intimacy the naturalist’s own Voyage of the Beagle—Chaffin brings Darwin’s odyssey to vivid life.

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History Department Statement on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

The faculty of the Department of History at Emory University are horrified and deeply saddened by events unfolding in Ukraine on account of the unprovoked and massive invasion by Russian forces. Putin’s government is directly responsible for this war of aggression. As historians, we understand the long struggles of Ukrainians for democracy and peaceful relations with all their neighbors – often against heavy odds. We affirm our solidarity with the Ukrainian people, and we join people of conscience throughout the world calling for crippling sanctions against the Russian regime and for urgent efforts to force an immediate withdrawal of Russian forces, address the humanitarian crisis, and restore democracy in Ukraine. 

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U.S. Senate Confirms Klibanoff and Dudley to Federal Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board

The U.S. senate has confirmed James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism Hank Klibanoff and Rose library instructional archivist Gabrielle M. Dudley to the federal Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board. Established in 2019 and convened in 2022, the panel has received authorization through 2027 to investigate unsolved cases from the Civil Rights era. Klibanoff is director of the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at Emory and host of the award-winning podcast Buried Truths. Read more about the federal cold cases panel and Atlantans’ significant roles within it: “Civil rights cold case board to have unique Atlanta flavor.”

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History Major Kheyal Roy-Meighoo Earns Awards and Support for Filmmaking

Congratulations to undergraduate history major Kheyal Roy-Meighoo, who was recently awarded the Women in Film and Television Atlanta (WIFTA) 2021 Scholarship. The scholarship is awarded to “deserving female students based on their academic standing, artistic talents and commitment to a curriculum.” Kheyal’s film “My Bunny’s Story,” co-created with Isaac Gazmararian, won ten awards, including three Gold Tripod awards, in the 2021 Nationwide Campus Movie Fest.

https://twitter.com/PamelaScully/status/1495094408747925520
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Graduate Student Mary Grace DuPree on Track for Ordination to Priesthood in Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta

Mary Grace DuPree, a doctoral student in history, was recently accepted as postulant for ordination to the priesthood in the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta. DuPree is an Ancient History student whose research centers on the intersections of history, religion, and art history. Her dissertation, titled “Faces of David: Late Antique and Medieval David Cycles in East and West,” analyzes the story of the Biblical King David as told in visual narrative in Coptic, Byzantine, Western Medieval and Crusader art.

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Anderson in ‘The Guardian’: “The US supreme court is letting racist discrimination run wild in the election system”

Charles Howard Candler Professor Dr. Carol Anderson recently published an opinion piece in The Guardian. Titled “The US supreme court is letting racist discrimination run wild in the election system,” the article draws important parallels between contemporary voting restrictions that target minority populations and historical disenfranchisement practices, especially those in the post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow United States. Read an excerpt below along with Anderson’s full piece here.

“This assault on African Americans’ right to vote was an assault on American democracy aided and abetted by the highest court in the land. The results were devastating. By 1960, there were counties in Alabama that had no Black voters registered, while simultaneously having more than 100% of white age-eligible voters on the rolls. In Mississippi a mere 6.7% of eligible Black adults were registered to vote.“

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Lesser Awarded Fulbright for Research in Brazil

Congratulations to Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History and Director of the Halle Institute for Global Research, for being awarded a Fulbright Research Grant in Brazil. Lesser’s project is titled, “Structural Health: Immigrants, the State, and the Built Environment in São Paulo, 1870-2020.” Luis Ferla at the Federal University of São Paulo and Fernando Cosentino of the Bom Retiro Public Health Clinic will host Lesser while he conducts archival research and fieldwork with the Brazilian National Health Service medical team. Read more about the project here.

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Anderson Quoted in ‘Reuters’ Piece about Arbery Hate Crime Case

Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently quoted in a Reuters article about the federal hate crime trial against the three men who killed Ahmaud Arbery. Anderson discusses the significance of the hate crime trial in advancing racial justice for Arbery’s family and the nation as a whole. Read an excerpt quoting Anderson below along with the full article: “Family of Ahmaud Arbery wants racial justice as murderers face new trial.”

Carol Anderson, an Emory University professor of African American studies who has watched the case closely, said the trial was “absolutely necessary” even though the men had already been convicted of murder.

“We must be clear, it was his blackness that put him in the crosshairs of these men,” Anderson said. “And that makes this a hate crime. This is part of the truth telling that society must have.”

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Brandeis Awards Anderson the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize

Brandeis University has awarded Dr. Carol Anderson the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize, given to those who have “made outstanding and lasting scholarly contributions to racial, ethnic and religious relationships.” The prize, which comes with a medal and $25,000, recognizes Anderson’s leading work on how racial inequality intersects with public policy in the United States, past and present. Anderson’s books include White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury, 2016), One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2018), and The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021). Anderson is Charles Howard Candler Professor, Chair of African-American Studies, and Associated Faculty in the History Department. Read more about her work at the Emory News Center here.

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SlaveVoyages Featured, Eltis Quoted in ‘NYT’ Article

The digital memorial and database project SlaveVoyages, spearheaded by Emeritus Professor David Eltis and maintained by numerous Emory faculty and alumni, was recently featured in an article in The New York Times. The piece, “We Still Can’t See American Slavery for What It Was,” provides an overview of the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans as well as the history of SlaveVoyages itself. Originating in the 1960s, the database was recently expanded with a new section titled “Oceans of Kinfolk” that includes information on trafficking within North America in the first half of the nineteenth century. The New York Times columnist, Jamelle Bouie, situates this expansion in the context of a broader reflection about how data on slave trafficking can provide access to or, alternatively, obscure the lived experiences of the enslaved. The Steering Committee of SlaveVoyages includes the following Emory History faculty and alumni: Allen E. Tullos (Professor, Emory History Department), Alex Borucki (PhD 11, Associate Professor, UC-Irvine), and Daniel B. Domingues da Silva (PhD 11, Associate Professor, Rice University). Read Bouie’s article here: “We Still Can’t See American Slavery for What It Was.”