Charles Howard Candler Professor Carol Anderson was recently quoted in a CNN article written by Brandon Tensley and titled “How race permeates the politics of gun control.” The piece discusses how racial violence, anti-Black prejudice, and Black self-defense movements have shaped gun policy in the U.S. from the 1960s through the present. Anderson is the author, most recently, of The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021), which analyzes the Second Amendment in the context of the citizenship and human rights of African Americans. Read the CNN piece here: “How race permeates the politics of gun control.”
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Film Produced by PhD Student Ayssa Yamagutchi Norek Takes Gold at Locarno
History Ph.D. student Ayssa Yamagutchi Norek produced, assistant directed, and wrote the lyrics to the short film “Neon Phantom,” which recently won the Pardino d’Oro SRG SSR for the Best International Short Film at the Locarno Film Festival. The festival is one of the five biggest in the world. “Neon Phantom” has been selected for other international festivals, including the Festival Internacional de Cine en Guadalajara, Mexico. Norek’s graduate work centers on modern Brazil, women’s studies, and female incarceration. Her graduate advisors are Jeffrey Lesser and Thomas D. Rogers.
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.
Andrade Publishes ‘The Last Embassy’ with Princeton UP
Dr. Tonio Andrade, Professor of History, has published a new book with Princeton University Press titled The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China (2021). Through an immersive narrative that draws on sources in Qing, Korean, Dutch, French, and Spanish, Andrade revises prevailing narratives about diplomatic and cultural relations between the West and China in the pre-modern period. One reviewer described The Last Embassy as “a superbly written, illuminating, and thought-provoking book on an important topic long overlooked by historians.” Read the full book summary below, along with an interview Andrade gave to Princeton UP in July 2021.
George Macartney’s disastrous 1793 mission to China plays a central role in the prevailing narrative of modern Sino-European relations. Summarily dismissed by the Qing court, Macartney failed in nearly all of his objectives, perhaps setting the stage for the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century and the mistrust that still marks the relationship today. But not all European encounters with China were disastrous. The Last Embassy tells the story of the Dutch mission of 1795, bringing to light a dramatic but little-known episode that transforms our understanding of the history of China and the West.
Drawing on a wealth of archival material, Tonio Andrade paints a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of an age marked by intrigues and war. China was on the brink of rebellion. In Europe, French armies were invading Holland. Enduring a harrowing voyage, the Dutch mission was to be the last European diplomatic delegation ever received in the traditional Chinese court. Andrade shows how, in contrast to the British emissaries, the Dutch were men with deep knowledge of Asia who respected regional diplomatic norms and were committed to understanding China on its own terms.
Beautifully illustrated with sketches and paintings by Chinese and European artists, The Last Embassy suggests that the Qing court, often mischaracterized as arrogant and narrow-minded, was in fact open, flexible, curious, and cosmopolitan.
Anderson Discusses the Voting Rights Act on its 56th Anniversary in ‘The Washington Post’
Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor, Chair of African American Studies, and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently quoted in a story in The Washington Post. The piece examines the state of the Votings Rights Act on its 56th anniversary through interviews with activists, lawmakers, and scholars. Read an excerpt below along with the full article: “Frustration and persistence for activists on the 56th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act.”
“Carol Anderson, a professor of African American studies at Emory University and author of ‘One Person, No Vote,’ a history of voter suppression in America, said violent reactions of Southern officials to Black people protesting discriminatory voting laws shook awake a country that had been ‘lulled to sleep or seduced into believing that this was just the way it was because it was legal.’
“Although officials are not using clubs, hoses and dogs, she said Biden has abandoned Black voters to an electoral system that continues to discriminate against them.“‘Biden is asking us to continue to be beaten for democracy. He’s continuing to ask us to be willing to stand in the 11-hour lines to vote. He’s continuing to ask us to be running around, trying to get the documents we need in order to be able to get the ID,’ Anderson said. ‘And he’s continuing to ask us to deal with the fact that 1,600 polling places have been closed since Shelby County v. Holder, the vast majority of those in minority areas.'”
Anderson’s ‘The Second’ Continues to Garner Widespread Attention
Dr. Carol Anderson‘s new book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021), continues to garner widespread attention in the press. The work analyzes the Second Amendment in the context of the citizenship rights and human rights of African Americans. We previously cataloged some of the press coverage of The Second in this story: “Anderson Publishes ‘The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America.’” Read more of the extensive and continuing coverage in the following:
- “The Second – Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America,” C-SPAN, June 1, 2021.
- Leonard Pitts, Jr. “That ‘well-regulated militia?’ It was originally created to quell rebellions of the enslaved, prof says | Opinion,” Miami Herald, June 18, 2021.
- State of Play, Black News Channel, June 19, 2021.
- Keri Miller, “A fresh look at the intent of the Second Amendment,” MPR News with Kerri Miller, June 21, 2021.
- Maiysha Kai, “‘Don’t Black People Have Second Amendment Rights?'” The Root, July 8, 2021.
- Dean Obeidallah, “Scholar Carol Anderson on the “anti-Blackness” coded into the Second Amendment,” Salon, July 12, 2021.
- “Carol Anderson: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America,” Commonwealth Club, July 21, 2021.
- “‘Braided In’: The Second Amendment and Anti-Blackness,” Amicus with Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, July 31, 2021.
- “Experts Debate Second Amendment’s Effects on Equality, Inequality in the United States,” Detroit Today, August 18, 2021.
Rucker, Anderson, and Goldmon Help to Organize ‘In the Wake of Slavery and Dispossession’ Symposium
This fall Emory University will host a symposium titled, “In the Wake of Slavery and Dispossession: Emory, Racism and the Journey Toward Restorative Justice.” Dr. Walter C. Rucker, Professor of African American Studies and History, Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor and Associated Faculty in History, and History doctoral student Camille Goldmon have served on the symposium’s steering committee. The Emory News Center recently published a feature story on the Sept. 21-Oct. 1 event, which will be free to the public. Read an excerpt from their story quoting Dr. Rucker below along with the full article: “Fall symposium connects activism to Emory’s history of slavery and land dispossession.”
“‘The past is a part of our living present,’ says Walter Rucker, an African American studies and history professor and steering committee member. ‘Slavery, dispossession and Jim Crow created a continuum for the racial logics we live with today. To talk about slavery and how it devalued Black lives helps us address why a police officer could kneel on a man’s neck for nine minutes. The same, or similar, logics that spawned racism energize patriarchy, homophobia and transphobia as well. Every person has a role in chipping away at these constructs in order to create a more just future.'”
Dudziak Compares Afghanistan and Vietnam in ‘The New York Times’
Dr. Mary L. Dudziak, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently quoted in an article in The New York Times. The piece, “Afghanistan, Vietnam and the Limits of American Power,” collects analysis from historians about the parallels and differences between the U.S. wars in, and departures from, Vietnam and Afghanistan. Dudziak is the author of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2012). Her latest work, “Going to War: An American History,” is under contract with Oxford UP. Read an excerpt from The New York Times piece quoting Dudziak below, along with the full article.
“Mary L. Dudziak, a law professor at Emory University and the author of “War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences,” agreed that any attempt at reckoning would be short-lived, and that in the long term America could become even less constrained in its assertion of power.
“‘I expect that one similarity,’ she said, ‘will be a failure to grapple with the way U.S. political culture undermines a more robust politics of military restraint, and this hampers powerful political opposition within Congress, which might put a brake on the entry into and persistence of war.’
“What might have been a sustained, nuanced conversation about limiting the president’s war powers, she added, has been short-circuited by the frenzy to decide ‘who lost Afghanistan.’
“‘In our toxic political environment,’ Professor Dudziak said, ‘Republicans are likely to use this moment to undermine President Biden, and partisanship may foreclose the deeper re-examination of American war politics that is sorely needed now, and was also after the war in Vietnam.'”
Allitt Recommends Best Works on U.S. Environmental History
Dr. Patrick N. Allitt, Cahoon Family Professor of American History, recently authored an annotated list of five essential works on U.S. environmental history for the website Shepherd. Allitt’s most recent book is A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism (Penguin, 2014), an intellectual history of American environmentalism since World War II. Find the list of recommendations here: “The best books to understand American environmental history.”
Camp’s ‘Unnatural Resources’ Reviewed in ‘Journal of American History’
The Journal of American History recently published a review of Dr. Michael Camp’s first book, Unnatural Resources: Energy and Environmental Politics in Appalachia After the 1973 Oil Embargo. Camp is a 2017 alumnus of the Emory History doctoral program. Dr. R. Mcgreggor Cawley, Professor at the University of Wyoming, reviewed Unnatural Resources. Read an excerpt from the review below along with the full piece here.
“Camp’s study provides an accessible and detail-rich narrative about the interactions between national policy goals and the localized political landscape in east Tennessee and nearby areas of West Virginia and Kentucky. On the face of it, this region appeared well suited to contribute to solving the energy crises of the 1970s. It was a major coal-producing area, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory was engaged in state-of-the-art nuclear technology, and the Tennessee Valley Authority had established the potential for hydroelectric power. Yet, as Camp deftly demonstrates, union strikes and railroad regulation disputes created obstacles for coal production. Similarly, he uses the struggle over the Clinch River Breeder Reactor to highlight problems with increasing the use of nuclear power. Finally, he explains how the Tellico Dam controversy presented a classic confrontation between energy and environment.”