Category / Faculty

by emoryhistorydept

Kylie Smith Cited in WaPo Article on Troubled Legacies of Nobel Prize Awardees

Stephen Nowland/Emory University


Dr. Kylie Smith, Associate Professor and Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow for Nursing and the Humanities, was recently cited in the Washington Post article “Now seen as barbaric, lobotomies won him a Nobel Prize in 1949.” The piece centers on Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz, who was seen as a visionary – and awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine – for his introduction of the lobotomy procedure in the mid-1930s. Tens of thousands of lobotomies were performed, disproportionately on women, people of color and those seen as violating social norms, such as gay men. Many patients died or were permanently harmed. Coinciding with the announcement of the 2023 Nobel prizes, the WaPo article considers whether awardees in situations like Moniz’s should have their prizes revoked. Smith is Associated Faculty in the Department of History and author of Talking Therapy: Knowledge and Power in American Psychiatric Nursing After WWII (Rutgers University Press, 2020). Read an excerpt from the article below citing Smith along with the full piece here.

“Over the years, ‘mental illness has been seen in terms of spiritual malaise [being taken over by demons] or through a moral deficiency,’ Nicole Shepherd, a social scientist at The University of Queensland, wrote in an email, and Moniz’s work demonstrated a kind of progress. ‘Mental illness was seen as a health problem, that is properly treated by doctors,’ she said.

“But that shift had a dark side, said Kylie Smith, a professor at Emory University who studies the history of psychiatry. Psychiatrists ‘wanted to be taken seriously as scientists’ and were ‘desperate to find some kind of heroic cure.’

“When it comes to the Nobel Prize, Smith said, the Nobel Committee should ‘think seriously about’ how it awards prizes. Elevating individual scientists, particularly those from elite institutions, ‘takes a certain amount of hubris,’ she said.

“‘And we know that pride comes before a fall.'”

by emoryhistorydept

Lowery Helps to Organize Second Teach-In with Muscogee Nation on Emory Quad


Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, Cahoon Family Professor of American History and a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, helped to organize a teach-in on the quad with the Muscogee Nation in late October of 2023. The event included storytelling, hymn singing, a stomp dance led by Rev. and Mekko (or “traditional leader”) Chebon Kernell, and a conversation with Muscogee artist Johnnie Diacon.

The teach-in marks the third year that members of the College of the Muscogee Nation (CMN) have visited Emory. The deepening relationship between the two institutions includes a $2.4 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in February of 2023 to “develop collaborative and independent programs advancing Native and Indigenous Studies and the preservation of the Muscogee language in a unique partnership between the two schools.” Lowery leads the newly-launched Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies, which will work towards the goals outlined in the Mellon grant. Read more about the teach-in from Lowery below, along with Emory News Center’s full coverage of the event here: “Furthering Emory community’s education, Muscogee Nation will conduct second teach-in Oct. 27.”

“‘The partnership and sense of exchange — trust building and shared learning — is growing between Emory and the Muscogee Nation. The teach-in adds a dimension of responsibility and relationship that builds on Emory’s Land Acknowledgment Statement.’

“The teach-in will not only edify; it will heal. ‘We are in need of the healing that this return of the Muscogee people to their homelands facilitates,’ Lowery says. ‘The Nation is leading us in the way that they use education as a healing force.'”

by emoryhistorydept

Anderson Places 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre in Historical Context for A Closer Look

Dr. Carol Anderson was recently a guest on an episode of WABE’s “A Closer Look” with Rose Scott centered on a new documentary about the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre. Titled (re)Defining History: Uncovering The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre and produced by WABE studios, the documentary tells the story of one of the deadliest outbreaks of racial violence in United States history. In her conversation with Scott, Anderson discusses the history of other race massacres in America’s past. Anderson is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department. Listen to the episode here: “New documentary explores untold story of the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre.”

by emoryhistorydept

Emory Undergraduates, Including ‘HIST 285: Intro to Native American History,’ Visit Ocmulgee Mounds

Emory students and faculty gathered on the stairs of the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historic Park.

Students in Dr. Michael Mortimer’s class “HIST 285: Introduction to Native American History” recently visited one of the most sacred sites in the ancestral homeland of the Muscogee People, the Ocmulgee Mounds, for the 31st Ocmulgee Indigenous Celebration. The Provost Postdoctoral Fellow in Native North American History, Mortimer co-organized the trip with Dr. Debra Vidali (Anthropology) and Heidi Aklaseaq Senungetuk (Music). Undergraduates from Vidali’s “Anthropology 190–Land, Life, and Place” and Senungetuk’s “Music 460RW–North American Indigenous Music and Modernity,” along with students from Emory’s Native American Student Association, also joined the chorot of 35 students and faculty. Their trip marked the first time that Emory University has organized an official journey to the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historic Park. The History Department was a co-sponsor of this event. Read more about the experience from Jessanya Holness, an undergraduate who travelled to the Ocmulgee Mounds and wrote a news story for the site Native American and Indigenous Engagement at Emory: “Relational Accountability and Place-Based Learning: Emory Students Participate in 31st Annual Ocmulgee Indigenous Celebration.”

by abritt

‘Patchwork Freedoms’ Wins Book Prize From American Society for Legal History


The American Society for Legal History has awarded Adriana Chira’s Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantations (Cambridge UP, 2022) with the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award, awarded annually for the best book in non-US legal history written in English. The prize committee praised how Chira “integrates legal and social history by seamlessly weaving together legal and nonlegal sources to tell a story that is complex, nuanced, and locally grounded.” Patchwork Freedoms was released as part of Cambridge’s Afro-Latin America series. Patchwork Freedoms has already won three other awards: Honorable Mention, Best Book, Nineteenth Century Section, from the Latin American Studies Association; the 2023 Elsa Goveia Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians; and the American Historical Association’s Rawley Prize. Read the full prize citation from the ASLH below.

Adriana Chira’s Patchwork Freedoms is a compelling account of the ways in which the free and semi-free black residents of eastern Cuba used law and custom to eke out their freedom over the course of the nineteenth century. Chira demonstrates how “day in and day out, enslaved people chipped away at enslavers’ authority locally, by negotiating the terms of their manumission and land access. They pulled one another out of plantation slavery gradually, yet consistently.” The committee was especially impressed by how Patchwork Freedoms integrates legal and social history by seamlessly weaving together legal and nonlegal sources to tell a story that is complex, nuanced, and locally grounded.

by emoryhistorydept

Anderson is Guest on WBUR Podcast The Gun Machine


Dr. Carol Anderson, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies, was recently a featured guest on the WBUR podcast “The Gun Machine,” which charts the development of the gun industry in the United States. Anderson discusses insights from her most recent book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally-Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021). Read a summary of the episode below and listen to the conversation in full here: “Fear sells guns. Here’s how that culture was created.”

Gun advertising is all about mistrust and the need to carry a gun for self-protection. But protection from whom?

The first European settlers wielded firearms to control enslaved people and fight Native people. Later, during Reconstruction, white Southerners afraid of losing their place in the new status quo picked up arms, not only for self-defense and to enact racist terror, but as a totem against imagined threats — sowing the roots of what guns represent to many people today.

In turn, this legacy of racism has long compelled some Americans of color to arm themselves. In 2020, five million Americans bought guns for the first time, including a record number of Black Americans.

In episode two of The Gun Machine, host Alain Stephens talks to historian Carol Anderson about the racist roots of the Second Amendment and travels down to Florida to attend the Pew Party. There, he talks to Black gun owners about why they carry, examining the link between our nation’s fraught history and why it’s so easy to sell us guns today.

by emoryhistorydept

Cors Dissertation Wins Cromwell Prize from the American Society for Legal History

Dr. Alexander M. Cors, a 2022 alumnus of the history doctoral program and currently Digital Scholarship Specialist at Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship, recently won the 2022 William Nelson Cromwell Prize from the American Society for Legal History. Cors’ dissertation, “Newcomers and New Borders: Migration, Settlement, and Conflict over Land along the Mississippi River, 1750-1820,” was advised by Drs. Yanna Yannakakis, Jeffrey Lesser, Adriana Chira, Malinda Maynor Lowery, and Paul Conrad (UT Arlington). The annually-awarded Cromwell prize recognizes the best dissertation in American legal history completed in the past year. View one of the maps that Cors produced for the project, described by the prize committee as “things of beauty,” along with the committee’s full citation below.

This dissertation represents a sparkling contribution to what Cors terms “the legal geography of settler colonialism in the Mississippi River Valley” during a pivotal time of contact between Indigenous peoples, Europeans, and Africans. Utilizing sources in three languages from Spain, France, and four states, Cors seamlessly weaves together narratives of bottom-up experiences of individuals making claims to land under Spanish law with the expansion of state power and control over the Mississippi River territory prior to and after the Louisiana Purchase. Instead of focusing on one or two large tribal nations, Cors takes the land as his analytical frame, beautifully telling the story of how parts of four tribes moved to lands west of the river and then used Spanish land grants to protect their claims against those later made by European-Americans. The tribal claimants were surprisingly adept at achieving their goals, at least for a time, helped by Spanish legal regimes that were much friendlier to first-comers than Anglo-American law later proved to be. By focusing on the river as geography and ecosystem, Cors is able to reveal dimensions of the slave economy that relied on the mobility the river enabled. Instead of cordoning off Louisiana as a civil law territory that had little influence on surrounding states and national legal development, Cors makes Louisiana’s physical position at the mouth of the river central to the movement and migration that undergirded the expansion of slavery in the South. Settlement patterns conferred social structure, he notes, and they also conveyed legal knowledge that proved essential to maintaining property ownership during periods of transition in governance. Indeed, Cors reveals that many non-European settlers along the river resisted the imposition of colonial state power and non-native legal systems, persuading the committee of his broader argument that local land claims drove territorial law and legal practice more than treaty negotiations and national sovereignties. What makes this new history possible are the Spanish-language sources that Cors deftly mines, both for the revealing family narratives he pieces together and for new cartographic data. Cors’s maps are things of beauty, wholly original to this project, that show how indigenous communities spread along the river for decades prior to the Louisiana Purchase. The committee marveled at the way Cors advanced a deeply complex argument with beautifully crafted prose. This novel and original thesis was a joy to read and will, the committee believes, make an important and influential book.

by emoryhistorydept

Yannakakis Interview, Making and Remaking History in Colonial Oaxaca, Airs on University and Community Radio

Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, Professor of History and Associate Department Chair, was recently interviewed by the Oaxaca-based university radio station Radio Pez en el SURCO (“Servicios Universitarios y Redes de Conocimientos en Oaxaca” [“University Services and Networks of Knowledge in Oaxaca”]). Titled “Oaxaca colonial, haciendo e rehaciendo historia colonial” (“Colonial Oaxaca, making and remaking history”), the interview draws on Yannakakis’ newest monograph, Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico (Duke UP, 2023). The interview was and will continue to be aired on the following Oaxaca university and community radio stations: Radio Universidad de Oaxaca (Sept 19, 2023); Radio Nanhdiá, Movimiento Radio, Estéreo Lluvia y Radio Aire Zapoteco Bëë Xhidza (September 23, 2023); Radio Nandiá (September 24, 2023); and Estéreo Dinastía Xhdca (September 25, 2023). You can also catch a recorded version on Spotify.

by emoryhistorydept

Goldstein Offers Historical Context for Representation of Jewish America in Oppenheimer


Dr. Eric Goldstein, Associate Professor of History, recently contributed to an Atlanta Jewish Times article focused on the blockbuster summer 2023 film Oppenheimer. Titled “Oppenheimer Story Set in Jewish America’s Golden Age,” the piece examines the film’s depiction of the Jewish scientists and politicians who helped to shape, and were shaped by, a crucial period of American history in the 1940s-’50s. A specialist in American Jewish history and culture, Goldstein offers illuminating insight into the broader context that figures like J. Robert Oppenheimer, his chief adversary Lewis Strauss, and others navigated in this pivotal period. Read an excerpt from the article below along with the full piece here.

“According to Emory University professor Eric Goldstein, a noted authority on American Jewish history, the 1950s were a difficult decade for American Jews, who were experiencing unprecedented acceptance in America during the years following World War II. He describes it as ‘a golden age for American Jewry.’

“‘There was a huge investment in building new synagogues and Jewish centers, particularly in the suburbs and things like that. And American culture now began to see Jews not as immigrant outsiders or members of some inferior foreign race but as part of the Judeo-Christian tradition where Jews, Protestants, and Catholics all seemed to have a kind of claim to being true Americans.'”

by emoryhistorydept

Klibanoff Helps Write New Chapter at WABE

Emory Journalism Professor Hank Klibanoff, who heads the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at Emory and is also Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently featured in an article about the shifting format and programming of the 75-year-old Atlanta NPR affiliate, WABE. Published in the Atlanta Jewish Times, the article discusses how Klibanoff’s renowned podcast, “Buried Truths,” has helped to carry WABE into a vital, digitally-oriented next chapter. A native of the small Jewish community of Florence, Alabama, Klibanoff’s work as a journalist and advocate for racial justice has received extensive recognition, including through a Pulitzer Prize and Peabody Award and a seat on the Presidential commission on racial justice. Read an excerpt of the AJT article below, along with the full piece here: “Klibanoff, Reitzes Lead WABE into a Digital Future.”

“When Hank Klibanoff won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for a book on journalism in the Deep South of the 1950s, he felt he might achieve a certain amount of fame and a boost to his professional reputation. Maybe, he thought, he might be able to make some money off the nonfiction award winner.

“‘It was good recognition,’ Klibanoff says. ‘It won a Pulitzer Prize, for goodness sakes, and you feel if you sell 30,000 copies of the book you’ve accomplished something, but even at that, I didn’t make a nickel from it, not even over several years.’

“But Klibanoff, who grew up in the small Jewish community of Florence, Ala., before his long and successful career in journalism, was destined for stardom. It would not come in newspapers or the publishing world he knew so well, but on the radio and in the rapidly growing world of podcasts — something he knew little about.”