Dr. Crystal R. Sanders, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently contributed analysis to the article: “Stevie Wonder’s Battle for MLK Day and the New Challenges to King’s Legacy.” Sanders helps to chronicle the critical role that prominent figures like Wonder played in securing the establishment of the federal holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., which was signed into law in 1983. Sanders also offers fascinating analysis of the struggle to get the holiday observed on state and local levels, including in her hometown of Clayton, North Carolina (see more on this below). A specialist in the twentieth-century history of the U.S., Sanders is the author, most recently, of the multiple prize-winning book A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs (UNC Press, 2024).
Read an excerpt from the Capital B News article below and find the full piece here.
“Whether we’re talking about the local, state, or federal level, it took a lot of maneuvering to get this holiday,” Sanders said.
She grew up in Clayton, a small North Carolina town about 15 or 20 minutes from Raleigh. She recalled how her father, the first Black American elected to the Clayton Town Council, basically had to trick the council into recognizing the holiday, even after North Carolina had adopted it as a state holiday in 1983.
“After several failed attempts at getting the holiday recognized, my father introduced a motion that the town would observe all holidays observed by North Carolina,” she said. “And many of his colleagues didn’t think twice. They voted in the affirmative. Later, during that same meeting, an elderly white man said, ‘Wait, did I just vote for the King holiday?’ And my father said, ‘You most certainly did.’”
Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, Emory Cahoon Family Professor of American History and a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, recently delivered remarks at the fourth installment of the annual Muscogee teach-in. The event brings representatives of the Muscogee Nation, displaced from the site of Emory’s campus in the early 1800s, to campus to teach Muscogee history and culture and to continue fortifying relationships with the Emory community. Since arriving at Emory in 2021, Lowery has been instrumental in building those relationships, including through programming at Emory’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies and curricular offerings in the History Department and beyond.
Dr. Thomas D. Rogers, Professor of History with specializations in environmental and labor history, has published a new book with co-author Dr. Jeffrey T. Manuel (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville). Titled Ethanol: A Hemispheric History for the Future of of Biofuels, the book chronicles the transnational history of ethanol in Brazil and the U.S. (the globe’s largest producers). Ethanol, which is Rogers’s third book,offers “the first full picture of the long history of this renewable fuel that from the beginning offered an imperfect alternative to oil.”
Though ethanol, a liquid fuel made from agricultural byproducts, has generated controversy in recent years—good or bad for the environment? a big-ag boon or boondoggle?—its use goes back more than a century. Tracing the little-known history of this promising and contentious fuel, Ethanol: A Hemispheric History for the Future of Biofuels reveals the transnational nature of ethanol’s development by its two biggest producers, the U.S. and Brazil. By drawing the connections between the shifting fortunes of ethanol in these two countries, the book presents the first full picture of the long history of this renewable fuel that from the beginning offered an imperfect alternative to oil.
Though generally presented as parallel stories, the histories of ethanol in the U.S. and Brazil are inextricably linked. Authors Jeffrey T. Manuel and Thomas D. Rogers show how policies in one country shaped those in the other. Brazil patterned its mid-century development on the U.S. model, adopting an automobile- and highway-focused transportation system and a fossil fuel-intensive agricultural sector. U.S. policymakers in turn took note when Brazil responded to the 1970s oil shocks by distributing ethanol nationwide, replacing half of its gasoline consumption. In the 2000s, the nations’ leaders worked together to dramatically expand ethanol production. Today, as a new generation of biofuels meant to power aviation and fight climate change again connects Brazilian and U.S. ethanol, Manuel and Rogers explain how the fuel’s future, like its history, is complicated by technical, scientific, economic, and social questions—about how to calculate carbon emissions, agricultural land use, national security and sovereignty, and the balance between government regulation and market forces. Understanding the future of biofuels demands a reckoning with this extensive, shared history—a reckoning that Manuel and Rogers’s far-reaching, deeply researched book brings into view.
Dr. Clifton Crais, Professor of History, has published his most recent book, The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World, with the University of Chicago Press. Crais foregrounds the role and significance of violence in the development of global capitalism from 1750 to the early 1900s, arguing that the period commonly described as the Anthropocene should, instead, best be understood as the Mortecene, or killing age. During this age, he writes, the new “ease and profitability of killing created a disturbing network of global connections and economies, eliminating tens of millions of people and sparking an environmental crisis that remains the most urgent catastrophe facing the world today.”
South African Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee offered the following praise for Crais’s book: “Synoptic in its reach, overwhelming in its detail, The Killing Age leaves one feeling like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver, who came to prefer the company of peaceable horses to membership of humankind.”
In the Q&A below, Crais gives us a glimpse into the making of the monograph as part of the History Department’s New Books series.
Books are produced over years if not decades. Give us a sense for the lifespan of this book, from initial idea to final edits.
In some respects, The Killing Age returned me to questions I have been interested in since graduate school in the mid-1980s when books by scholars like Immanuel Wallerstein, Eric Wolf and others called attention to the importance of understanding the world economy and the development of capitalism. But it was only about a decade ago when I decided it was time to undertake a new project, partly inspired by a graduate course Mark Ravina and I taught on comparative empire. I became convinced that the literature on the Anthropocene was inadequate or at least incomplete and that, more generally, we had a poor understanding of the role of violence in the development of capitalism and the making of our contemporary world of planetary peril.
The research, writing and publication took about eight years. There was a lot of climate science and environmental history I had to first learn, and I had to decide on which archives I would delve into. I spent lots of time in England, but also many places across the United States. So, it took longer to research and write than previous books. Plus, The Killing Age is hefty, over 700 pages long, plus an associated website, thekillingage.com.
What was the research process like?
The Killing Age was by far the most difficult project I have undertaken. I had never done research in the histories of South America, Asia, and especially the United States. I also relied on multiple databases, some massive. The total amount of data I have stored and used for the project is more than 1 terabyte, in other words more than a million pages. One of the biggest challenges was how to navigate all the material while producing a book that is narratively driven and accessible to the general public. I ended up going through more than a dozen drafts.
Are you partial to a particular chapter or section?
I was originally trained in the history of Africa, so the chapters covering this part of the world had a certain familiarity; not so with other regions, including the United States. I am partial to the section “The American Ways of Killing” that explores the hunting of whales, beaver, and bison and its connections to economic change and the emergence of the US as a global power. Just learning about the entwined histories of humans and non-humans was fascinating, especially as I wrote some of these chapters during COVID-19.
How does this project align with your broad research agenda (past, present, or future)?
The Killing Age is both a kind of culmination and a departure. I have been thinking about many of the issues I explore for decades. At the same time, the project has convinced me of the importance of writing a global history of the twentieth century, about the possibilities of human progress and how these possibilities were so often subverted. In my next project I will be returning to the issue of violence and especially the redemocratization of the means of destruction, particularly after 1945.
Dr. Carol Anderson, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies, recently offered analysis on MSNBC about the U.S. Supreme Court’s upcoming review of the Voting Rights Act. Along with Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern and The Crystal Ball editor-in-chief Larry Sabato, Anderson discusses the likely effects of further weakening the landmark legislation, including for the 2026 midterm elections.
In the summer of 2025 third-year History major Hannah Lo was a finalist for the U.S. State Department’s Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) program. The program supports U.S. citizens to develop foreign language and cultural fluencies through intensive summer training abroad. Lo, who is also minoring in quantitative social sciences, was among only four Emory students accepted for 2025. When the Chinese language program she was planning to attend at China’s Dalian University of Technology was cancelled, Lo pivoted to serve as an immigration intern with Asian Americans Advancing Justice and conducted research with Dr. Yami Rodriguez, Assistant Professor, and Dr. Chris Suh, Associate Professor. Read more about the 2025 Emory CLS cohort here.
The History Department annually awards its Clio Prizes to the best paper in a Freshman History Seminar and the best research paper in a junior or senior History Colloquium. This year, we are pleased to recognize outstanding work by Emma Rose Ceklosky and William Wainwright.
Ceklosky received the prize for the best paper written in a freshman seminar for her work, “From Exotic Blossoms to Budding Women in Science.” Ceklosky completed this paper in Dr. Judith Miller`s spring 2025 freshman seminar “The World of Jane Austen.” About the course, she writes: “I loved the stories I discovered about horticulture and how it empowered 19th-century women. Dr. Miller’s class brought history to life for me. I recommend her to everyone and am honored that she nominated me for this prize.” Ceklosky plans to double-major in English and Creative Writing and Psychology.
Spring 2025 graduate William Wainwright received the prize for the best research paper written in a history junior/senior colloquium for his work “Recentering the Black Sea,” which he completed in Dr. Michelle Armstrong-Partida`s course “Europe: Merchants-Pirates and the Slave Trade.” Wainwright graduated summa cum laude with a BA in International Relations (highest honors) and History in the spring 2025. Reflecting on the prize and his experience as a major, he writes: “Thank you so much for this. I am honored and grateful to receive this prize. The Emory history department, and Dr. Armstrong-Partida’s class in particular, have been hugely important for my academic development. I look forward to continuing to stay in touch with the professors and staff who have made it possible. Thank you again.”
Congratulations to Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History and Department Chair, on winning the Howard F. Cline Memorial Prize from the Conference on Latin American History for her latest book, Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico (Duke University Press, 2023). The Klein prize is awarded biennially to the book or article in English, German, or a Romance language judged to make the most significant contribution to the history of Indians in Latin America. Since Time Immemorial has received two other major awards: the 2024 Friedrich Katz Prize from the American Historical Association and the 2024 Peter Gonville Stein Book Award from the American Society for Legal History. Her first book, The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Duke University Press, 2008), also won the Klein prize. Find the abstract of Since Time Immemorial below, and read the Open Access version of the book (made possible via Emory’s TOME initiative) here.
In Since Time Immemorial Yanna Yannakakis traces the invention of Native custom, a legal category that Indigenous litigants used in disputes over marriage, self-governance, land, and labor in colonial Mexico. She outlines how, in the hands of Native litigants, the European category of custom—social practice that through time takes on the normative power of law—acquired local meaning and changed over time. Yannakakis analyzes sources ranging from missionary and Inquisition records to Native pictorial histories, royal surveys, and Spanish and Native-language court and notarial documents. By encompassing historical actors who have been traditionally marginalized from legal histories and highlighting spaces outside the courts like Native communities, parishes, and missionary schools, she shows how imperial legal orders were not just imposed from above but also built on the ground through translation and implementation of legal concepts and procedures. Yannakakis argues that, ultimately, Indigenous claims to custom, which on the surface aimed to conserve the past, provided a means to contend with historical change and produce new rights for the future.
The article was produced as part of the Senegal Liberations Project (of which Aponte is a team member), a digital humanities collaborative formerly funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This project analyzes the liberation records of 28,930 enslaved Africans who sought freedom between 1857 and 1903.
Aponte’s research interests center on emancipation, labor, and law in the French empire. Her work investigates how women wove, and were woven into, the financial and familial networks of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Senegal. Drs. Mariana P. Candido, Adriana Chira, and Clifton Crais serve as her advisers.
Dr. Jinyu Liu, Betty Gage Holland Professor of Roman History, was awarded a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in the School of Historical Studies for the fall 2025 semester. This prestigious membership allows for focused research and the free and open exchange of ideas among an international community of scholars at one of the foremost centers for intellectual inquiry.
At IAS, Jinyu Liu will be working on “Outsiders in Town,” which explores social exclusion and the negotiation costs of relocation for mobile and immigrant tradesmen and craftsmen in the Roman West during the first three centuries.
Each year, IAS welcomes more than 250 of the most promising post-doctoral researchers and distinguished scholars from around the world to advance fundamental discovery as part of an interdisciplinary and collaborative environment. Visiting scholars are selected through a highly competitive process for their bold ideas, innovative methods, and deep research questions by the permanent Faculty—each of whom are preeminent leaders in their fields. Past IAS Faculty include Albert Einstein, Erwin Panofsky, John von Neumann, Hetty Goldman, George Kennan, and J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Among past and present scholars, there have been 37 Nobel Laureates, 46 of the 64 Fields Medalists, and 24 of the 28 Abel Prize Laureates, as well as MacArthur and Guggenheim fellows, winners of the Turing Award and the Wolf, Holberg, Kluge, and Pulitzer Prizes.
