Undergraduate students and faculty gathered on Wednesday, October 28, 2020, for a virtual workshop to discuss a chapter from Assistant Professor Maria R. Montalvo‘s book Archive of the Enslaved: Power, Enslavement, and the Production of the Past. The conversation focused on enslaved people, illness, and commodification in the antebellum courtroom.
Author / abritt
Crespino Places Biden’s Visit to Warm Springs in Historical Context for ‘The AJC’
Dr. Joseph Crespino, History Department Chair and Jimmy Carter Professor, was recently quoted in an article in The Atlanta Journal Constitution about the upcoming visit of Democratic presidential nominee Joseph R. Biden to Warm Springs, Georgia. The town served as a vacation retreat for Franklin Delano Roosevelt during his 12 years as president. AJC political columnist Jim Galloway interviewed Crespino to help explain the significance of the visit along with the parallels between Roosevelt and Biden and the 1930s and 2020s. Read an excerpt below, along with the full article: “Opinion: Joe Biden heads for Warm Springs and the Roosevelt legacy.”
“Joe Crespino is the Jimmy Carter Professor of History at Emory University. Much of his work has involved the Depression-era South.
“Biden’s visit is ‘interesting symbolically and historically because of where Biden fits within the Democratic party in 2020,’ he told me. ‘He’s had to move to the left in the primary to accommodate a younger, more liberal wing within the party. Roosevelt was pushed by the left wing of his party.
‘Yes, [Roosevelt] was a liberal. He was surrounded by liberals. But he was pulled to the left by the circumstances of the time. He became more liberal, and the New Deal became more far reaching,’ Crespino said.“
PhD Student Robert Billups Wins Grant for Research at LBJ Presidential Library
Third-year graduate student Robert Billups has been awarded a Moody Research Grant for his current project, titled “White Supremacist Bombings and Arsons Against U.S. Civil Rights Institutions, 1940-1975.” The grant, which is underwritten by The Moody Foundation and awarded by a faculty committee from the University of Texas at Austin, will support Billups as he conducts research at the LBJ Presidential Library. Billups is advised by Joseph Crespino, History Department Chair and Jimmy Carter Professor, and Allen Tullos, Professor and Co-Director of Emory Center for Digital Scholarship.
Jewish Museum of Maryland Invites Goldstein to Speak on ‘The Consequences of Acceptance’
Dr. Eric L. Goldstein, Associate Professor of History, is the featured speaker for an upcoming live stream event hosted by the Jewish Museum of Maryland. Goldstein, who also serves as Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, will speak on “The Consequences of Acceptance: From the ‘Jewish Race’ to White Privilege.” Jewish Museum of Maryland director Tracie Guy-Decker will join Goldstein for a conversation about how the place of Jews in America’s racial culture has changed over time. The event is Sunday, November 8, 2020 at 4:00pm EST. Find more information here, including the link for registration.
Emory News Center Highlights Recent Honors for Eckert and Klibanoff
The Emory News Center’s most recent Emory Report highlighted recent faculty accolades across campus, including those earned by Dr. Astrid M. Eckert and Hank Klibanoff. The report highlights Eckert’s new book, West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy and Culture in the Borderlands (Oxford UP, 2019), which won the 2020 DAAD/German Studies Association Book Prize for the Best Book in History or Social Sciences. Read our interview with Dr. Eckert about the book from last year here. The article also celebrated Hank Klibanoff, whose podcast Buried Truths won the 2020 national Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television Digital News Association in the large market category.
‘The Nation’ and ‘Deutsche Welle’ Cite Anderson on Voter Suppression
Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and associated faculty in the History Department, was recently quoted in two articles discussing the past and present of voter suppression in the United States. Anderson commented on the history of ballot restrictions in the state of Texas for The Nation article, “Texas and the Long Tail of Voter Suppression.” She offers further insights into how recent policy measures suppress voting in Georgia in the article “US election: Early voting shines light on fight over voter suppression,” published by Deutshe Welle. Read an excerpt from the Deutshe Welle article below along with the full pieces at the links above.
“Georgia keeps doubling down on trying to stop Black people from voting as well as stopping Hispanics and Asian Americans,” Carol Anderson, professor of African American Studies at Emory University and author of One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy, told DW, pointing out that all three groups overwhelmingly vote Democrat.
“It’s a legacy of knowing that this system in place is not designed to honor and embrace your right to vote, but is systematically working through different ways to stop it,” she said.
Lipstadt Diagnoses Anti-Semitism at Core of QAnon Conspiracy Theory
Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies and associated faculty in the History Department, was recently quoted in the NBC News article “Trump’s refusal to disavow QAnon is part of his pattern of encouraging hate for political gain.” The article addresses Trump’s refusal to disavow the conspiracy group QAnon. The piece’s author, Jewish Democratic Council of America executive director Halie Soifer, writes that QAnon frequently employs “anti-Semitic tropes and age-old conspiracy theories.” Soifer draws on comments that Prof. Lipstadt posted on Twitter. Watch Dr. Lipstadt’s commentary below, and read the full NBC News article.
Erica Bruchko (PhD, ’16) Helps to Archive Generations of Black Emory Students’ Calls for Change
In August of 2020 Emory University President Gregory L. Fenves asked Dean Yolanda Cooper, the University Librarian, to research and make available online calls for change from past and present generations of Black Emory students. Dr. Erica Bruchko, a 2016 alumna of the History Department’s graduate program and librarian for African American Studies and United States history at Emory Libraries, is working to advance this project. Bruchko has published three articles so far with collaborators Jina DuVernay, collection development archivist for African American collections, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, and Maureen McGavin, writer, Emory Libraries. Read about the work of generations of Black leaders and anti-racism at Emory in the first three articles to emerge from the initiative:
- “Black Students’ Activism at Emory: Past and Present,” August 17, 2020
- “Protests and Movements: From Anti-Lynching to Black Lives Matter,” September 22, 2020
- “Voting Rights: Vote Like Your Life Depends on It,” October 16, 2020
Katz, Park, and Kelly Present Undergraduate Honors Thesis Proposals
Please join us this coming Thursday, October 29, at 4:20pm to learn about the latest history honors research projects. Three students, Cameron Katz, Sun Woo Park, and Ryan Kelly, will present their work on felon disenfranchisement in Florida, the time of South Korea’s president Kim Dae-jung at Emory, and the representation of syphilis in Renaissance art. If you have not received the zoom link via email, please contact Prof. Eckert at aeckert [at] emory [dot] edu.
PhD Student Anjuli Webster Publishes Article in the ‘South African Historical Journal’
Second-year PhD student Anjuli Webster recently published an article in the South African Historical Journal. The article is titled “Transatlantic Knowledge: Race Relations, Social Science and Native Education in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa.” Webster’s faculty advisers are Dr. Clifton Crais and Dr. Yanna Yannakakis. Read the abstract of “Transatlantic Knowledge” below along with the full article.
In this paper I trace knowledge flows between South Africa and the United States in the early twentieth century. I analyse these flows as parts within a broader white supremacist political project and technology of power. Focusing on the early Union period from the 1910s to the 1930s, I explore links, networks and exchanges within and across imperial and colonial spaces that spanned the Atlantic. These include institutional, financial, intellectual and personal relationships and networks between philanthropic institutions, race relations ‘experts’ and social scientists. In particular, I focus on the South African Institute of Race Relations’ role in importing education models from the American South and shaping narratives around ‘native education’ in South Africa. In this case, positivist science functioned to instil and root a racial order. I argue that attending to the circulation and entanglement of ideas between these global spheres offers new insight into the genealogy of anthropological and social scientific knowledge during the historical conjuncture of the Union period.