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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'”
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.”
Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently a featured guest on The Washington Post Live with Post journalist Sarah Ellison. Framed by the theme “Democracy in America,” Anderson offers historical context and contemporary analysis of issues threatening the vitality of democracy in the U.S., ranging from polarization in Congress and popular mistrust in institutions to the dissemination of political disinformation. Anderson is the author, most recently, of The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021). Watch the interview below or on YouTube: “Historian Carol Anderson on America’s democracy and the lessons of the past.”
Four Emory College undergraduates were recently recognized for outstanding historical research through the History Department’s Clio Prizes, awarded annually to the best research paper in a junior/senior History Colloquium and to the best paper in a Freshman History Seminar. This year’s recipients are:
For the best paper written in a freshman seminar
Ethan Hill, “Are Video Games Causing Violence?” (Nominated by Prof. Judith Miller)
Thora Jordt, “Zapata’s Ghost: The Reinterpretation of Revolutionary Agrarian Values and Symbolism in the Zapatista Movement” (Nominated by Prof. Yanna Yannakakis)
For the best research paper written in a junior/senior colloquium
Tori Jordan, “Reproducing Slavery” (Nominated by Prof. Yami Rodgriguez)
Yingyi Tan, “Meat and Modernity” (Nominated by Prof. Laura Nenzi)
Congratulations to the 2022-23 winners! Find the archive of all past winners here.
Dr. Patrick N. Allitt, Cahoon Family Professor of American History, pictured with Emory alumna and trustee Susan Cahoon
Dr. Patrick N. Allitt, Cahoon Family Professor of American History, was recently quoted in an article in the New York Post about labor strikes in Hollywood, on car manufacturing plants, and beyond. An expert in the history of industrialization, Allitt offers historical context for the current surge of union organizing and work stoppages. He also comments on the relationship between labor, technological innovation, and prosperity. Read an excerpt from the article below along with the full piece here: “What writers and auto workers strikes say about unions and innovation.”
“Professor Allitt empathizes with today’s workers, but with his historian’s eye sees a picture of broadly-shared progress, even on the labor front. ‘Every time one set of jobs has disappeared, new ones have appeared and in every generation more of the jobs have been relatively interesting, well paying, and fulfilling.'”
Professor Hank Klibanoff, Director of the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently contributed to the identification of two of the at least nine unknown Black victims of the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre. The two victims, Stinson Ferguson, 25, and 13-year-old Marshall Carter, were among 25 Black Atlantans killed by a massive white mob in one of Georgia’s bloodiest, yet least remembered, outbursts of collective racial violence. The revelation coincided with the 117th anniversary of the massacre. Klibanoff and staff from the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project worked alongside the National Center for Civil and Human Rights and the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society on the effort to identify the unknown victims. Read more about this project here:
