Category / Public Scholarship

by emoryhistorydept

Anhhuy Do (C’24) Traces Family’s Remarkable Journey from Sài Gòn to Nashville in ‘Southern Spaces’

Do’s grandfather, Đỗ Phương Anh, in front of Bách Thảo Market in Nashville, after passing his citizenship test in 2000. Photo courtesy of the Anhhuy Do.

Alumnus Anhhuy Do, a 2024 graduate who completed majors in History and Political Science, has published a powerful article in Southern Spaces. The piece, “Sài Gòn to Nashville: A Refugee Journey,” traces the remarkable and harrowing migration of his family from Vietnam to Nashville, Tennessee, where they resettled in the 1990s as part of the U.S. government’s Humanitarian Operation. Published fifty years after the fall of Sài Gòn and the communist takeover of Laos, Cambodia, and Việt Nam, Do’s piece illuminates the legacies of the post-Việt Nam War era in Southeast Asia and among Vietnamese American communities throughout the U.S.

While at Emory, Do was active in many groups, including Asian Pacific-Islander Desi American Activists, Pi Sigma Alpha, the Vietnamese Student Association, he Atlanta Urban Debate League, Center for Civic and Community Engagement (CCE) Society, and Imagining Democracy Lab. In his senior year, he won the History Department’s Matthew A. Carter Citizen-Scholar Award and the Jane Yang Award for Community Advocacy from the Office of Campus Life.

Do is pursuing his PhD in Vietnamese History from Princeton University, supported by a Presidential Fellowship. He extends a special thank you to Dr. Allen Tullos, Professor and Co-Director of Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, “for making this publication possible and remaining steadfast in amplifying unheard voices across Southern US history.” Read Do’s piece here: “Sài Gòn to Nashville: A Refugee Journey.”

“Many South Vietnamese sought new identities as they resettled in locations such as California, Texas, Washington State, Louisiana, and the DC metro area including Maryland and northern Virginia. Perhaps surprisingly, Tennessee also became home to generations of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants with intense transnational migration histories. One family’s story is that of my own, whose refugee experience does not follow the typical timeline of helicopter escapees and boat people. Rather, as Humanitarian Operation arrivals, my family’s history offers an illuminating narrative.“

by emoryhistorydept

David Eltis Wins W.E.B. DuBois Medal of Honor

David Eltis, Robert W. Woodruff Professor Emeritus of History, has won the W.E.B. DuBois Medal of Honor, Harvard University’s highest award in the field of African and African American studies. The DuBois medal is given to individuals in the United States and across the globe in recognition of their contributions to African and African American culture and the life of the mind.

A specialist in the early modern Atlantic World, slavery, and migration (both coerced and free), Eltis is the author of many prize-winning works, including Economic Growth and The Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Oxford University Press, 1987) and The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Eltis co-created the Transatlantic Slave Trade database and website SlaveVoyages.org, a pioneering digital initiative that compiles and makes publicly accessible the records of the largest slave trades in history.

Eltis received the award at the recent conference “SlaveVoyages: New Research & Uncharted Waters,” which was held at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard and featured multiple Emory History graduate program alumni.

Eltis with Daniel B. Domingues da Silva (PhD, 2011) at the recent conference focused on the SlaveVoyages project.

by emoryhistorydept

Golcheski’s ‘AHR’ Article Explores Resilience in Social Movements


Graduate student Amelia Golcheski co-authored an article just published in a special edition of The American Historical Review focused on the theme of resilience. In their article, Golcheski and co-author Jessie Ramey (Chatham Univ.) use the career of activist Kipp Dawson to examine how resilience can operate in social movements even as they encounter setbacks, losses, and violent repression. Golcheski and Ramey’s multimedia, open education website, “Kipp Dawson: The Struggle Is the Victory,” develops the idea of “radical collaboration” and focuses on movement networks, interconnections, and affects. Their contribution includes an introduction to Dawson’s work and a video on the making of the site. The Kipp Dawson site was produced by the Emory University Center for Digital Scholarship, co-directed by Dr. Allen E. Tullos. Read the AHR piece, titled “Love, Hope, and Joy,” and view an interview with Dawson from their site below.

by emoryhistorydept

Lal in TIME: “What a Mughal Princess Can Teach Us About Feminist History”


Dr. Ruby Lal, Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently author an article in TIME, “What a Mughal Princess Can Teach Us About Feminist History.” Lal’s piece centers on her latest book, Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan (Yale, 2023), which chronicles the life of Princess Gulbadan, a fascinating figure who travelled widely and authored the sole extant work of prose by a woman in the early decades of the Mughal Empire. Lal’s article also addresses the marginalization of feminist and women’s histories, both in Gulbadan’s time and our own. Read an excerpt from the TIME article below along with the full article. Also listen to an interview with Lal on WABE’s City Lights.

“Books and chronicles from centuries past are precious gifts. Holding onto their words, we can delve into the beauty and torments of human life. With such rare possessions, we come close to another time; watch her creation, her uncertainties, her discoveries, the stuff of history. But uncovering feminist history is a slow process, and too often, women historians are the only ones willing to do that work. Beveridge taught herself Persian to reveal Gulbadan’s history. I have spent years combining hundreds of documents to assemble the adventures of daring and imaginative Mughal women.”

by emoryhistorydept

Lowery’s New Film ‘Lumbeeland’ Explores Impact of Drug Trade on Lumbee Communities


Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, Cahoon Family Professor of American History, has written and produced a new short film, titled Lumbeeland. With an all-Native crew and cast (the first film written, produced, and starring members of the Lumbee tribe), Lumbeeland explores the impact of the drug trade on Lumbee communities in Lowery’s birthplace of Robeson county, North Carolina. The film will premiere at the Lumbee Film Festival in July 2024, and the producers are in the midst of a fundraising campaign to support its release to wider audiences. Read a great piece about the origins and aims of the films here, and watch the trailer below.

by emoryhistorydept

Anderson Addresses More Challenges to Voting Rights Act on MSNBC

Dr. Carol Anderson, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently appeared on MSNBC to discuss a new challenge to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The eighth circuit federal appeals court overturned Section 2 of the Act, which gives private citizens the right to sue in the name of fair voting rights. Anderson appeared alongside Judith Browne Dianis, Executive Director of the Advancement Project. Anderson is the author of numerous books, including One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2018). Watch the full MSNBC interview with host Charles Coleman: “New attack on Voting Rights Act threatens Black vote protections: ‘It’s a problem’.“

by emoryhistorydept

Malinda Maynor Lowery Discusses Native Pasts, Presents, and Futures in Walk & Talk with Josh Newton


Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, Cahoon Professor of American History, recently joined Senior Vice President of Advancement Josh Newton for an edition of his series Walk & Talk with Josh Newton. Lowery, a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina and a historian of Native America, discusses her work as a scholar, teacher, documentary filmmaker, and tribal community member. Since coming to Emory from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2021, Lowery has been instrumental in facilitating Emory’s reckoning with practices of dispossession and colonialism, including by helping to craft the university’s Land Acknowledgement and creating a deep, reciprocal partnership with the College of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Lowery will lead Emory’s new Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies, set to launch in the 2023-24 academic year. Watch her conversation with Newton, which also includes discussion of what drew her to the History Department, here: “Understanding the present begins in the past.”

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 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

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.”