Congratulations to Dr. Daniel LaChance on receiving the 2022-23 Chronos Faculty Fellowship in the Emory College of Arts and Sciences. LaChance, the Winship Distinguished Research Professor in History, 2020-23, and Associate Professor of History, is the third recipient of the award. A year of paid leave and research stipend will support the completion of LaChance’s next book, Empathy for the Devil: Executions in the American Imagination. Undergraduate students will work alongside LaChance as research assistants on this project. Read more about the fellowship and Empathy for the Devil here: “Emory historian Daniel LaChance named 2022-23 Chronos Fellow.”
Category / Research
‘TIME’ Features Research Conducted by Klibanoff and Students for ‘Buried Truths’ Podcast
TIME recently featured historical research conducted by the Emory team behind the “Buried Truths” podcast. Season three of the podcast, which is led by James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism Hank Klibanoff and comprised of Emory undergraduate students, focused on the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. The researchers identified various direct descendants of Arbery, including an enslaved local leader in agriculture and environmental engineering, Bilali Mohammed, through census research. Read an excerpt from the TIME piece below along with the full article: “What Ahmaud Arbery’s Death Has Meant for the Place Where He Lived.”
“In the 1700s, some of Watts and Arbery’s shared ancestors arrived in the region in a group of enslaved families brought to Sapelo Island to cultivate rice, cotton and indigo to enrich their white slaveholders. On his father’s side, Arbery was also the direct descendant of Bilali Mohammed, an enslaved man originally from West Africa brought to the island after first being enslaved in the Caribbean, according to the team of students behind Atlanta Public Radio’s Buried Truths podcast. The students, lead by Hank Klibanoff, director and co-teacher of the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at Emory University, were able to confirm that lineage by hunting through Census and other records after a detailed tip shared by Barger, something of a local-history buff. Mohammed—whose slaveholder represented Georgia in the U.S. Congress—was an important source of African agricultural and engineering techniques befitting a climate where rice will grow; that knowledge was key to making Brunswick a prosperous center of economic and cultural activity. Mohammed left behind a 13-page Arabic-language manuscript that is today in the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript collection at the University of Georgia.“
“Visions of Slavery,” Co-Organized by Walter C. Rucker, Awarded Prestigious Mellon Foundation Grant
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Emory College a $225,000 grant for a year-long investigation of the histories of unfreedom in the Black Atlantic. The grant will support a symposium titled “Visions of Slavery,” which is co-organized by Dr. Walter C. Rucker, Professor of History, and Bayo Holsey, Associate Professor of Anthropology. The event will take place as a part of Mellon’s 2022-2023 Sawyer Seminar series and involve faculty from other university campuses across Atlanta. History Department faculty Mariana Candido and Adriana Chira are part of the working group for the seminar. Read more about the symposium via the Emory News Center as well as the Department of African American Studies.
Scott Benigno (C22) Publishes Article on British Railway Investments in Brazil
History major Scott Benigno (C22) recently published an article in the Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History titled, “The Economics of Empires: An Analysis of British Railway Investments in 1850s Imperial Brazil.” The article investigates Britain’s interests in developing railways in Brazil before the country’s industrialization. The paper was mentored by Dr. Thomas D. Rogers, Associate Professor of Modern Latin American History and Arthur Blank/NEH Chair in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences (2018-2021). Read the article abstract below and find the full piece here.
“While Brazil is not often thought to be connected to Britain in our present day, Brazil’s early independent history was inextricably linked with the European imperial power. Using A Report on the Proposed Railway in the Province of Pernambuco, Brazil written by British civil engineer Edward De Mornay in 1855 as an example, this paper looks specifically at Britain’s interests in developing railways in the mostly non-industrialized Brazil and the reasons behind.”
Graduate Student Olivia Cocking Wins Snell Memorial Essay Prize from Southern Historical Association
Congratulations to second-year graduate student Olivia Cocking on winning the 2021 John L. Snell Memorial Prize from the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association. The prize recognizes the best graduate seminar paper in European History. Cocking was awarded for her piece, “Pronatalism’s Peripheries: Housing Poor Women in Early Third Republic Paris, 1880 – 1912.” Associate Professor Judith A. Miller advises Cocking’s graduate work.
Welcoming New Faculty: Q & A with Malinda Maynor Lowery
In July 2021 the Emory History Department welcomed Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, a historian and documentary film producer and member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. Dr. Lowery joins Emory as Cahoon Family Professor of American History. In the latest installment of our “Welcoming New Faculty” series, Dr. Lowery offers a glimpse into her research and teaching along with the factors that drew her to Emory.
Tell us about the focus of your research and principal current project.
I have a longstanding interest in collaborations using methods like oral history and documentary film; working with people to elevate narratives and events that are underappreciated but explain a great deal about our contemporary society has guided me through many projects. Right now I’m working on two projects. One is a media experience for a museum that focuses on the foundational role racial stereotypes have played in American entertainment. Combined with displaying objects from the museum’s collection, we are juxtaposing found footage from stand up comedy, television, film, and historical images and audio to reveal the ways that comedy both reinforces and refutes stereotypes. My other major project involves a book of essays on the shared history of Black and Indigenous Americans. Its premise is that violence and erasure are ongoing features of the United States, but Black and Indigenous Americans have been challenging and repairing that harm since the harm began. The essays are written with particular attention paid to the ways in which these communities constructed narratives of origin, wealth, and law to effectively combat assaults on sovereignty and independence. I’m writing with a sense of urgency—the US has enormous capacity to address the crises of our time, in particular climate change. As we face the prospect of human extinction, American stories that offer paradigms for belonging and possibility are more necessary than ever. Such history is a matter of life and death.
Was there a particularly memorable moment from archival or field research that has had a lasting impact on your work or career?
They come from unexpected places, for sure. My research room is the world, in a way I’m a little bit like an untrained ethnographer and I take my inspiration from everywhere. The book I’m working on now came together the day I learned that George Floyd was born in my home region of southeastern North Carolina. I had been reading, writing, and doing research in questions of race and Indigeneity for years, but that day it dawned on me in a different way. It was no longer just an abstract problem of the discipline that we were telling these stories separately, it was actually nonsensical, it was bad history. It was what an Australian aboriginal scholar, Susan Page, described to me once as a breakthrough concept—once you see it, you can’t unsee it. George Floyd was born in Fayetteville, NC, his family members still live there, only 30 minutes from where my father, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and hundreds of ancestors are buried in the Lumbee homeland. Floyd’s roots are entangled with my own, and in a Lumbee way of thinking, roots are not past, or dead. They are essential for the garden’s continued survival. Like our roots, our history should not a burden. It should be a source of nourishment from which we can continue to hold ourselves accountable to one another.
What sort of courses – undergraduate or graduate – are you most excited to offer at Emory?
I’m teaching a version of the Native American history survey that we are calling “Legal Histories of Native People”—using the law (both Indigenous law and U.S. law) as a throughline to understand a complex and sometimes contradictory history. There are over five hundred federally-recognized Indigenous nations in the United States, each with their own history and culture. Wrapping your mind around it takes a strong organizing principle, and the law helps us achieve that. On the way we read lots of primary sources, a novel, and we focus on gaining skills in research, analysis and argument, including partnerships with terrific people from the Carlos Museum, University Libraries, and the Barkley Debate Program.
What drew you to Emory?
This campus has a demonstrated commitment to reckoning with its history and there is a tremendous opportunity to do that work in partnership with the Muscogee Nation. They are the original owners of this land who produced knowledge in medicine, law, art, and so many other fields, created a language and built a nation here, where our campuses are located. Being a relevant research institution in the 21st century is more than just understanding this as a matter of history. They precede Emory’s contributions in those areas, yes, but they continue to nourish us, as roots nourish a garden.
Doctoral Candidate Anastasiia Strakhova Creates Workshops Amidst Pandemic
Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies recently published a feature of the pandemic-era work of History doctoral candidate Anastasiia Strakhova, who was the Anne and Bill Newton Graduate Fellow at the Rose Library for 2020-21. After COVID-19 thoroughly derailed her original plans for the fellowship year, Strakhova responded by organizing two virtual workshops on grant writing and the process of conducting research during the pandemic, respectively. Strakhova won a highly competitive Summer Dissertation Writing Grant from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), which is currently supporting her work completing the dissertation, titled “Selective Emigration: Border Control and the Jewish Escape in Late Imperial Russia, 1881-1914.” Drs. Eric Goldstein and Ellie R. Schainker are advisors to Strakhova. Read the full article from the Tam Institute here: “Doctoral Candidate Creates Workshops Amidst Pandemic.”
Honors Students Present Summer 2021 Thesis Research
On Friday, Sept. 17, 2021, the department of history held its first in-person undergraduate event since March 2020. At this event, five history honors students – Ellie Coe, Sarah Gordon, Carson Greene, Willie Lieberman, and Channelle Russell – delivered presentations about the thesis research they conducted during Summer 2021. This research was made possible with history department funding provided through the George P. Cuttino Scholarship, Theodore H. Jack Award, James L. Roark Prize, and Bell I. Wiley Prize.
Fulbright Awards Support Research by Brunner and Steinman
Two History Department students have received research awards through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program. PhD candidate Georgia Brunner will study and research gender, labor, and identity between 1918-1985 in the building of Rwanda. Undergraduate alum Jesse Steinman (21C), a history and German studies double major, was selected for the Fulbright Community-Based Combined Award in History for a project developing an interreligious educational program about Graz, Austria’s Jewish history. Read the full list of Emory students selected for Fulbright awards this season here.
Q&A with 2021 ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellow Alexander Cors
Earlier this year PhD candidate Alexander Cors was named a 2021 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow. In the following Q & A exchange, Cors offers more context about his dissertation, titled “Newcomers and New Borders: Migration, Property Formation, and Conflict over Land along the Mississippi River, 1750-1820.”
What was the genesis of your project, and how has it changed since you first entered graduate school?
The project I am working on now is quite different from the project I started with when I first entered graduate school. Geographically, I stayed in the wonderfully complex eighteenth-century Mississippi Valley, but thematically, my project has changed directions many times. My interest in the process of land-claiming expanded from an inquiry into colonial migration and European competition to a much broader analysis of property formation, settler colonialism, and dispossession.
My dissertation project now examines how small and mobile Indigenous groups from the Houma, Shawnee, Delaware, and Avoyelles-Tunica-Biloxi nations used Spanish colonial laws to protect their land, property, and sovereignty from white settlers. I argue that the process of property formation was a contested and malleable set of practices, negotiated through occupation, land grants, and court proceedings. My dissertation challenges traditional periodizations and geographies of North American history by viewing colonial expansion, Indigenous dispossession, and the rise of the slave-plantation economy as interconnected processes that spanned across national and imperial boundaries.
What has the research process during dissertation fieldwork been like?
I am fortunate that my fieldwork takes me to many interesting and beautiful cities. Following archival trails and trying to piece together stories that happened in the eighteenth-century Mississippi Valley brought me to libraries and archives on both sides of the Atlantic – from New Orleans to Aix-en-Provence, and from Mexico City to Madrid.
I analyze every-day interactions and conflicts between Indigenous peoples, Europeans, and Africans through the lens of property formation using French and Spanish correspondence, Euro-American travel accounts, Indigenous oral histories, Spanish judicial records, and maps, land surveys, and archeological reports.
Despite its challenges, working with such a wide variety of sources ensures that I never have a boring day in the archives. It also helps that archives like the Historic New Orleans Collection are located in the French Quarter, so I can always be sure to find a nice Feierabend drink at the end of a long day in the reading room.
How do digital humanities approaches figure into your work?
Digital Humanities has been a key element of my dissertation process since the very beginning. I use historical geography and digital mapping not only as a tool for visualization, but also as an integral research methodology. Trying to map Indigenous, colonial, and African settlement patterns has led me to both ask new questions and offer different approaches than previous scholarship.
Support from the Fox Center, the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation enabled me to develop technical skills and conduct research for a digital mapping project that has since become an integral part of my dissertation.
Are you partial to a particular chapter, section, or story from the project so far?
I decided to start with the chapter I presumed to be the most challenging. Chapter 3, “Possessing the Border,” is a case study of property formation and dispossession that analyses Houma and French-Acadian settlements in the Lower Mississippi Valley from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Using eighteenth century French and Spanish notarial acts, correspondence, and Houma oral history, this chapter is a legal history of migrating, settling, claim-making, titling, and defending property. One challenge was that all actors in this chapter are constantly re-locating – there is no static “homeland” over time. In part, I argue that the notion of “homeland” is fluid and malleable as people adapt to new circumstances and locations.
What I like about this chapter is the variety of sources that helped me draw this story over almost two hundred years. By looking at original and rarely used Spanish and French handwritten archival records, I could draw out perspectives that differ from the nineteenth-century English translations that previous historians used.