Category / Publications

by abritt

Dr. James V.H. Melton Publishes ‘Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier’

James V.H. Melton, Professor of History, has published a new monograph with Cambridge University Press titled Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier. See below for a description of the new work.

This book tells the story of Ebenezer, a frontier community in colonial Georgia founded by a mountain community fleeing religious persecution in its native Salzburg. This study traces the lives of the settlers from the alpine world they left behind to their struggle for survival on the southern frontier of British America. Exploring their encounters with African and indigenous peoples with whom they had had no previous contact, this book examines their initial opposition to slavery and why they ultimately embraced it. Transatlantic in scope, this study will interest readers of European and American history alike.

Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier

by abritt

Daniel LaChance Publishes Article in ‘The Conversation’

Professor LaChance, Assistant Professor in the Emory History Department, published an article in The Conversation titled “Utah’s firing squad plan is another twist in America’s long quest for a perfect execution method.”

Here is an excerpt from the piece:

Shooting people kills them more quickly and reliably than electrocuting, gassing, or poisoning them. But it’s harder to watch or read about than lethal injection.

The raw violence of the act puts it at odds with the aesthetic values that have historically shaped the development of capital punishment in the United States. Guns uncomfortably blur the line between the righteous violence of the state and the lawless violence of the criminal. The gun is, historically speaking, the only instrument of execution that is also commonly used by criminals. Its use in executions reminds us of a past in which there was less of a distinction between the state that carried out the law and those it punished.

Indeed, in its jarring loudness, its bloodiness, and its mutilating effects on the body, execution by firing squad comes much closer to expressing the “eye for an eye” logic that has long stoked Americans’ demand for the death penalty, but that has, since the nineteenth century, been carefully excised from its actual administration.

That, in the end, is what is most newsworthy about Utah’s decision to return to the gun. In the violent imagery it conjures, execution by firing squad has the power to remind Americans of a simple truth that lethal injection has, for a long time, made it easy for them to forget: executions are acts of extreme, body-mutilating violence.

by abritt

PhD Alumnus Alex Borucki and Dr. David Eltis Co-Publish Article in the American Historical Review

Emory History Department PhD Alumnus Alex Borucki co-wrote and published “Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America” in The American Historical Review with Dr. David Eltis of Emory and Dr. David Wheat of Michigan State. The article can be found here.

Borucki is currently an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. Borucki’s From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identities in the Río de la Plata will be published by University of New Mexico Press in 2015. He is also the author of Abolicionismo y tráfico de esclavos en Montevideo tras la fundación republicana (Biblioteca Nacional, 2009) and co-author, with Karla Chagas and Natalia Stalla, of Esclavitud y trabajo: Un estudio sobre los afrodescendientes en la frontera uruguaya(Pulmón Ediciones, 2004.

David Eltis is Emeritus faculty at Emory and Research Associate at the University of British Columbia. Among many publications, he is the author of 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), and co-author, with David Richardson, of the Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2010). Along with Paul Lachance and Martin Halbert, he is the co-creator of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, an open-access website containing an interactive database of more than 35,000 slave voyages that has led to major advancements in the understanding of this traffic.

by abritt

Emily Blanck (PhD, 2003) and Rafael R. Ioris (PhD, 2009) Publish New Works

Congratulations to former Emory graduate students Emily Blanck and Rafael R. Ioris for their new publications. Blanck, Associate Professor of History at Rowan University, published Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revoluationary South Caroline and Massachusetts (University of Georgia Press). Ioris, Assistant Professor at the University of Denver, published Transforming Brazil: A History of National Development in the Postwar Era (Routledge).