Dr. Carol Anderson was recently interviewed by Washington Post senior writer Frances Stead Sellers about her contribution to the bookMyth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past (Basic Books, 2023). Edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, the book aims to upend misinformed myths about American history that the editors see as taking strong root in contemporary popular discourse. Anderson’s chapter, “Voter Fraud,” addresses how misinformation about the frequency and threat of voter fraud have fueled practices of racialized voter suppression. Watch Anderson in conversation with Francis Stead Sellers here and read a excerpt from the transcript of their interview below. Anderson is Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Professor Anderson, you similarly give great historical context to voter suppression, talking particularly about 19th century Mississippi, but can you tell me whether you feel today is different, or are we reliving what you have observed and documented earlier on in U.S. history?
DR. ANDERSON: I’m going to say apocryphally, Mark Twain said history may not repeat itself, but it sure do rhyme. And we are in the rhythms right now. We are rhyming. And so part of what Mississippi did in 1890 was to say, oh, we don’t want Black folks to vote, but because of the 15th Amendment that says that the state shall not abridge the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, then how do we write a law saying we don’t want Black folks to vote without writing a law saying we don’t want Black folks to vote? And Mississippi said, “Got it. What we’re going to use is to use the legacies of slavery and make those legacies of slavery, like poverty and illiteracy, the access to the ballot box. And so you get a poll tax, and you get a literacy test, and you get a Supreme Court that blessed both of those policies on high, and that led to this massive disfranchisement of Black folks that you saw in the South with the poll tax and the literacy test.
Now you think about what happened in the U.S. after Shelby County v. Holder, whereas the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 gutted the Voting Rights Act, the pre-clearance provision of the Voting Rights Act, and you had these states implement these policies that on its surface looked race neutral, like voter ID. But in fact, they were racially targeted.
These state legislatures went through, and they looked at, by race, who had what types of government-issued photo IDs and then made the ones that Whites had the primary access to the ballot box.
In Alabama, for instance, they said you must have government-issued photo ID, but your public housing ID does not count for access to the ballot box. Now that looks like race neutral, except 71 percent of those who had public housing IDs in Alabama were African American, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund found that for many, it was the only government-issued photo ID that they had.
And also note that what they used, just like Mississippi in 1890, was the language of “cleaning up” the ballot box, “ending corruption” at the ballot box. We must have “election integrity,” except just like in Mississippi in 1890, there wasn’t the kind of individual voter fraud that could change an election that we’re seeing, that we were seeing back then.
Trailer for “Monument: The Untold Story of Stone Mountain”
Dr. Joseph Crespino, Department Chair and Jimmy Carter Professor of History, was interviewed for the Atlanta History Center’s first-ever original documentary, “Monument: The Untold Story of Stone Mountain.” The film provides a window into the making of the largest monument to the Confederacy in the world, including aspects of its history that are often glossed over. The Atlanta Journal Constitution recently published an article about “Monument,” in which they cite one of Crespino’s comments from the film. Read a quote below from the AJC piece below along with the full article: “Atlanta History Center’s first documentary takes on Stone Mountain.” Also view the documentary itself on the Atlanta History Center site: “Monument: The Untold Story of Stone Mountain“
“It was finished in 1972, more than a century after the end of the Civil War.
“The park, Emory University historian Joseph Crespino says in the film, is ‘a place that memorializes people who fought for a version of the country that we reject today.’
“‘A lot of people just don’t even know,’ Cynthia Spence, co-chair of anthropology and sociology at Spelman College, says. ‘They’d don’t understand that Stone Mountain, as well as many Confederate monuments all over this country, were very intentionally placed to keep Black people in their places.'”
Dr. Daniel LaChance, Winship Distinguished Research Professor in History, 2020-23 and Associate Professor of History, will participate in an upcoming interdisciplinary discussion on incarceration and the death penalty. The event will take place in Callaway S420 on Tuesday, February 21, from 6-7pm. The discussion will also feature Dr. Joel Zivot, Associate Professor in Emory’s Department of Anesthesiology. LaChance is a legal scholar working at the intersection of American legal and cultural history, criminology, and literary studies. His most recent book, co-authored with Paul Kaplan, is Crimesploitation: Crime, Punishment, and Pleasure on Reality Television (Stanford University Press, 2022).
Dr. Joseph Crespino, Department Chair and Jimmy Carter Professor of History, recently appeared on the Georgia Public Broadcasting show Political Rewind. On a panel that included Jim Galloway (former political columnist, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution), Matthew Brown (The Washington Post), and Tia Mitchell (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution), Crespino discussed how the insurrection at the U.S. capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 will be remembered. Crespino is an expert of the political and cultural history of the twentieth-century United States and of the U.S. South since Reconstruction. Listen to the full conversation, hosted by Bill Nigut, here: “Political Rewind: The legacy of January 6th; McCarthy faces a fourth day of House votes.”
Two History Department faculty members have received a grant from a program within the Emory Office of the Provost designed to foster research and scholarly work that advances social justice. Dr. Mariana P. Candido, Associate Professor, and Dr. Adriana Chira, Assistant Professor, are collaborating on a project titled “Land Dispossession, Inequality and the Legacies of Slavery in Africa and Latin America.” The project envisions the creation of an open-access digital resource on these themes, two undergraduate courses at Emory, and trips to Cuba and Puerto Rico. Read a fuller description of the initiative below, along with other projects funded through this program: “Emory awards funds for five faculty projects focused on arts and social justice.”
“This project, conducted in collaboration with Mariana Dias Paes at the Max Planck Institute for Law and Legal Theory, will study land dispossession in Africa and Latin America and establish an open-access digital resource that shares critical historical documents, transcripts, legal papers and other records relating to the topic. The grant also funds the creation of two undergraduate courses on the politics of development, rural transformation and food sovereignty that will combine a trip to Puerto Rico and Cuba with in-class instruction.“
Dr. Astrid M. Eckert and Dr. Daniel LaChance at the 2022 Feast of Words Celebration.
For the last 19 years the Center for Faculty Development and Excellence, Emory Libraries, and the Emory Barnes and Noble Bookstore have hosted the Feast of Words, an annual event to celebrate the Emory faculty members who have written or edited books in the prior year. The December edition of the festival featured 89 books, including seven by historians at Emory, published between September 1, 2021, and August 31, 2022. Read the titles of the books published by Emory historians below, along with the full list here: “Celebrating Faculty Authors.”
Tonio A. Andrade. Het laatste gezantschap: De Nederlandse missie van 1795 en de westerse betrekkingen met China. Robert Vernooy, trans. Querido.
Anthony A. Briggman(Theology) and Ellen Scully, eds. New Narratives for Old: The Historical Method of Reading Early Christian Theology. Essays in Honor of Michel René Barnes. Catholic University of America P.
Astrid M. Eckert. Zonenrandgebiet. Westdeutschland und der Eiserne Vorhang. Thomas Wollermann, Bernhard Jendricke, and Barbara Steckhan, trans. Ch. Links.
Daniel LaChance and Paul Kaplan. Crimesploitation: Crime, Punishment, and Pleasure on Reality Television. Stanford UP.
Pablo Palomino. La Invención de la Música Latinoamericana. Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Polly Price. Plagues in the Nation: How Epidemics Shaped America. Beacon.
Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies and the U.S. State Department’s special envoy to fight antisemitism, recently discussed her work and global antisemitism as part of Emory’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’s Thought Leader Series. Ambassador Lipstadt was interviewed by Dr. Carol E. Henderson, Vice Provost for Diversity and Inclusion. The Thought Leader Series identifies opportunities to engage in conversation with some of the foremost thinkers at Emory and more broadly across the world who can provide educational awareness around topics and issues that create barriers to experiencing a more inclusive Emory, and a more humane and just society. Lipstadt is Associated Faculty in the History Department. Watch the full conversation above or on YouTube at: “Thought Leader Series | Antisemitism: A Conversation w Dr. Deborah Lipstadt & Dr. Carol E. Henderson.”
Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies (TIJS) published a feature story on recent doctoral graduate student Anastasiia Strakhova, whose work TJIS supported throughout her graduate career. Strakhova completed her dissertation, titled “Selective Emigration: Border Control and the Jewish Escape in Late Imperial Russia, 1881-1914,” in 2022 under the advisement of Dr. Eric Goldstein and Dr. Ellie R. Schainker. This spring Strakhova is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Jewish Studies at Duke University. Read an excerpt from the TJIS feature below, along with the full article: “Recent TJIS Graduate Highlight: Anastasiia Strakhova.”
“My research interest evolved gradually,” Dr. Anastasiia Strakhova explains when asked about her scholarly development. After getting her BA in her home city of Kharkiv, Ukraine, and then her MA from the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, Dr. Strakhova traveled to the United States to continue her education. While studying Yiddish in New York, Dr. Strakhova found her curiosity about Jewish migration. “I was so fascinated about the attachment that Jews felt to the United States, and the romanticization of the old country… And then I got very interested in seeing the archives and reading about the way that people were living [at that time in history].” Dr. Strakhova’s dissertation addresses late Imperial Russian migration policies through the prism of racialization and criminalization of Jews.
Cover of the September 2021 volume of The American Historical Review.
Dr. Adriana Chira, Assistant Professor of History, was recently awarded an article prize from the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. The prize recognizes Chira’s 2021 article in The American Historical Review, titled “Freedom with Local Bonds: Custom and Manumission in the Age of Emancipation.” The annual award goes to the best article in any field by a woman scholar. The prize committee praised the article’s “creativity in scholarship and expression” and “found Chira’s work to be innovative in its approach and exploration of those seeking manumission from slavery.” The report continued: “Considering social networks as a ‘resource’ in the manumission process offers a new facet for understanding this matrix. Chira also considers the grey area between enslaved and free, building on scholarship considering the nature of identity and freedom among enslaved peoples.” Read the abstract from the article below.
“Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, across Latin America, expansive rural communities of African descent forged freedom from below in the shadows of highly exploitative extractive economies. Their efforts push us to reconsider established genealogies of the age of emancipation. Freedom through conditional manumission and enslaved people’s reliance on social networks to obtain it opened the door to custom inside first-instance district courts in such areas. Judges turned to vernacular understandings of rights and obligations as they clarified the ambiguous statuses of the conditionally freed for which written law offered few provisions. Through manumission and legal actions to defend freedom, peasants of African descent on the margins of the global economic system grounded their rights in state structures as local custom. Black freedom within such territories represents a mode of community governance that remains invisible if studied by focusing on mobility or nation building. Seen from a place such as Santiago de Cuba, the nineteenth century was not just a time when Africans and Afro-descendants pursued social inclusion through ideologies of national citizenship and diasporic connections. It was also a time of freedom through membership in local communities, which women and families were especially instrumental in forging.“
Mariana P. Candido, Associate Professor of History, published Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola: A History of Dispossession, Slavery, and Inequality with Cambridge UP in September of 2022. Below, Dr. Candido gives us a glimpse into the making of this, her third single-authored monograph, as part of the History Department’s New Faculty Publications 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.
My latest book, Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola, started to take shape in 2017-2018. Thanks to an American Council of Learned Society (ACLS) fellowship in 2017-2018, I was able to spend one year reading, thinking, and writing. Until the fellowship, I was convinced I was writing a book about women in Angola based on documents I had transcribed years earlier. It was during the process of writing and reading other books and articles that I realized my book was not about women, but it was about processes of wealth accumulation in Angola from the 17th to the 19th century. In many ways, writing helped me to refine and reorganize my ideas. It made it clear that I could only understand women’s economic role in Angola if I figured out how men and women conceived of wealth and poverty. I was lucky I was able to return to archives in Angola and Portugal after I started writing my book manuscript. After months of writing, it was important to return to the archives during the 2018 summer. Doing so helped me to fill out gaps and add new information about local notions of land tenure. In many ways, Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola became a very different book from the one I had imagined I would write before the fellowship.
But there is a long history between drafting a manuscript and getting a book published. English is my third language, so, generous friends and professional copy editors helped me to polish my text. External readers and colleagues offered crucial feedback, helping me to rethink and clarify key points in my argument. Librarians and archivists help me secure copyright for illustrations and access to crucial resources. In so many ways, the publication of a book involves many people beyond the author.
Writing a book takes a long time and, when the writing is done, there is the production phase, which can also consume lots of time and energy. In the case of Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola, the production ran parallel to teaching, other commitments I had already assumed, and life events. I joined Emory in 2020, so when I arrived here, I was revising and reorganizing chapters while moving into a new place, adjusting to a new academic environment, preparing new courses, and settling into a new city during a global pandemic. In many ways, the final steps of my book took place while we were trying to understand how to survive COVID-19. Finally, my book entered production in 2021, when we were still dealing with travel restrictions, a virus spreading around the world, and supply chain challenges.
What was the research process like?
The research process involved visiting different archives and libraries in Angola, Portugal, and Brazil. I combined written documents scattered in different countries and locations to avoid relying only on colonial or administrative reports. I had access to a rich collection of judicial cases held at a storage room at the Tribunal da Comarca de Benguela, or the Benguela Court House, which contains many legal proceedings dating back to 1850. I complemented these records with earlier legal summaries available at the Angola National Archive, in Luanda, and in Portuguese archives. In these documents we can get lots of information about local people, who were often not able to produce written documents, but who appear as witnesses, litigants, or petitioners, nonetheless. These are wonderful documents for social historians.
I also tapped into a seventeenth and eighteenth century collection of documents related to Angola available at the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I also consulted records created by West Central African rulers, which are scattered in archives in Angola and Portugal. And to get more information on non-elite actors, such as poor women and enslaved individuals, I created a database of baptism, marriage, and burial records available at the Bispado de Luanda and the Nossa Senhora do Populo Church, in Benguela. This allowed me to include more historical actors in my narrative. In many ways, my research was Atlantic in nature and involved a wide array of types of historical records. It was long, involving several trips to Angola and Portugal, where I spent months in dusty archives reading documents from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Are you partial to a particular chapter or section?
This is such a difficult question! I have enjoyed researching and writing each one of the chapters. While in Chapter 1 I examine local West Central African conceptions of land access, use, and occupation, I focus on the transformations of property rights during the nineteenth century. It was such exciting research to piece together different mechanisms that West Central Africans used to claim and exercise rights over land for over two hundred years. In Chapter 3, I focus on individuals embracing written records to protect their interests. I looked at land registries, deeds, and legal cases to understand how men and women made use of multiple strategies to protect and pursue rights. In Chapter 4 and 5, I move away from clashes over land to focus on disputes over people. So, I analyzed wills, passports, licenses, fugitive adds, and public complaints to interrogate similarities and differences between ownership claims over people and land. While in Chapter 4, I focus exclusively on enslaved individuals, my attention is directed to freed individuals in Chapter 5 – and the limitations of their emancipation.
Chapter 6 was the first chapter I wrote, and it is quite strange that it ended up being one of the last ones in the book. In this chapter, I selected several cases of African women who went to the colonial court claiming ownership rights over land. Their success in securing land, however, represented dispossession of local rulers and their subjects. While some African women were able to secure private ownership of land, several populations were forced to relocate from the territories they had occupied for generations. Skillful women generated written records that supported their claim, while local chiefs relied on evidence not recognized by the colonial court as legitimate. The last chapter examines how elites and commoners expressed wealth in the accumulation of goods. It is about West Central Africans as consumers of products produced elsewhere, such as Dutch biscuits, Chinese porcelain, sugar cane alcohol produced in Brazil, and textiles made in India or England. I examined how women and men’s consumption patterns differed and changed over time. It is a book about violence, slavery, dispossession, and the imposition of new ideals that continue to affect people who live in Angola. It is an effort to understand the roots of inequality in Angola in the twentieth-first century.
How does this project align with your broad research agenda?
I have been researching and studying the history of Angola for over 20 years. In my first book, Fronteras de Esclavización: Esclavitud, Comercio e Identidad en Benguela, 1780-1850 (2011), initially published in Spanish and later translated into Portuguese, I wrote about the demographic impact of the slave trade in Angola. I have examined processes of enslavement to understand how, when, and why people were seized and enslaved. This is important because I work on the region of Africa that has lost the largest number of enslaved individuals to the transatlantic slave trade. Of the top 5 slaving ports on the coast of Africa, three of them were in West Central Africa. This means that to understand the African diaspora, we need to comprehend the background of the people who were enslaved and deported from West Central Africa. In my second book, An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World: Benguela and its Hinterland (2013), I focused on the region of Benguela from the early 17th to the mid-19th century, trying to reconstruct the history of this region. I focused on the history of local states and their interactions with Portuguese traders. It was an attempt to bring attention to a town, Benguela, that had not received much attention from scholars until then. So, I decided to write a book about the town, its inhabitants and its connections to the Atlantic world and the interior of the African continent. So, this third book, Wealth, Land and Property in Angola: A History of Dispossession, Slavery and Inequality, is a continuation of my commitment to study the history of Angola and its global importance. This is a place that has never been isolated from the rest of the world – and I try to show this in my work.
In the process of researching and writing Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola, I came across new primary sources and questions. Now, that this book is published, I am interested in going back to my initial goal of writing a book about women in West Central Africa, 1500s-1800s. In many ways, this new book will help other scholars understand the contributions of West Central African women. I am also interested in combining Atlantic and Mediterranean histories, by focusing on the case of a single individual in a subsequent book project. This project will take me out of Angola history, since it focuses on a slave trader who became a captive in the Regency of Algiers in the late eighteenth century. It is a book that combines Atlantic and Mediterranean histories. But I need to do more archival research for both projects.
Besides these monographs, I am also in the last stages of a catalog of over 2,000 legal cases available at the Tribunal da Comarca de Benguela, in Angola. In collaboration with Dr. Mariana Dias Paes of the Max Planck Institute for Legal History, Frankfurt, and Juelma Matos at the Universidade Katyavala Bwila, Benguela, we have identified the historical legal documents available at the Court House storage room. We also wrote an introductory essay on the history of the courthouse and law in Angola, which will be the first publication about the subject in Angolan history. The global pandemic has delayed the conclusion of this project due to the challenges to finalize the revisions of some catalog entries. This catalog will soon be published by the Max Planck Institute and the Universidade Katyavala Bwila.
So, my interest in history of Angola is not over and, I am sure, will lead to new books, articles and edited collections.
