Episodes


On Art and Activism 

LaTanya S. Autry is the inaugural Curator of Art and Civil Rights at Mississippi Museum of Art and TougalooCollegeLaTanya joins Tom Thurston on this episode of Slavery and Its Legacies to discuss Art and Activism.

 

On Law and Narratives 

Anna Mae Duane and Jean Allain, of the Gilder Lehrman Center’s Modern Slavery Working Group at Yale University join Tom Thurston on this episode of Slavery and Its Legacies. Anna Mae and Jean discuss their work on modern slavery around law and narratives.

On Trafficking and Sex Work

Jessica R. Pliley and Zoe Trodd, of the Gilder Lehrman Center’s Modern Slavery Working Group join Tom Thurston on this episode of Slavery and Its Legacies. 

On Forced Labor and Modern Slavery

Genevieve LeBaron and Kevin Bales, of the Gilder Lehrman Center’s Modern Slavery Working Group, join Tom Thurston on this episode of Slavery and Its Legacies. 

The Abolitionist Movement

Manisha Sinha joins Slavery and Its Legacies to discuss the transnational history of the movement to abolish slavery.

Representations of Women, Motherhood and Breastfeeding in British Slavery

Kerry Sinanan joins Thomas Thurston on this episode of Slavery and Its Legacies to discuss representations of women, motherhood and breastfeeding in paintings depicting British slavery.

Voices from the Archive

Connor Williams joins Slavery and Its Legacies to discuss the creation of “Voices from the Archive,” an online teaching resource based on documents gathered from the U. B. Phillips Papers in Sterling Memorial Library’s Manuscripts and Archives collection. 

American Diplomacy during the era of Reconstruction

Erik Mathisen joins Thomas Thurston on this episode of Slavery and Its Legacies to discuss American foreign relations during the Reconstruction era and how a generation of former Union soldiers saw slavery, free labor, capitalism, and emancipation around the world through the prism of their wartime experiences. 

Mapping North American Slave Narratives

Jonathan Schroeder, a recent Postdoctoral Associate at Yale’s Digital Humanities Lab, discusses his post-doctoral research project “Passages to Freedom: Worlding the North American Slave Narrative.” “Passages to Freedom” examines the language and mobility of 294 African-American slave narratives.

Political Violence during Reconstruction

Brad Proctor joins Thomas Thurston on this episode of Slavery and Its Legacies to discuss the Ku Klux Klan and Political Violence during Reconstruction.

The pre-Garrisonian Abolitionist Movement 

Nicholas Wood joins Thomas Thurston on this episode of Slavery and Its Legacies to discuss his book-in-progress, “Before Garrison: Antislavery & Politics in the New Nation.”

Strange Amalgamation: Party Realignment as Racial Realignment in the Civil War Era

In this episode of Slavery and Its Legacies Joshua Lynn joins Thomas Thurston to discuss the antebellum Democratic Party’s effort to transform itself into a party dedicated to “preserving the white man’s republic.”

Race, Removal, and the Rights to Remain in the Early American Republic

Samantha Seeley joins Thomas Thurston on this episode of Slavery and Its Legacies to discuss her book-in-progress, “Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain in the Early American Republic.” 

The Pirates, the Judge, and the Amistad Trial: Or How the Panda Slavers May Have Determined the Fate of the Amistad Africans

Professor Manuel Barcia joins Thomas Thurston on this episode of Slavery and Its Legacies to discuss an episode covered in his current book project: The Pirates, the Judge, and the Amistad Trial: Or How the Panda Slavers May Have Determined the Fate of the Amistad Africans.

The Wickedest City in America: Sex, Race, and Organized Crime in the Jim Crow South

Dr. Tammy Ingram joins Thomas Thurston on this episode of Slavey and Its Legacies. They discuss Dr. Ingram’s upcoming book project titled The Wickedest City in America: Sex, Race, and Organized Crime in the Jim Crow South.

 

Movements of Black Refugees during the Civil War Era

Thomas Thurston spoke with Abigail Cooper, an Assistant Professor in History at Brandeis University and a visiting fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center, about her work examining Civil War refugee or contraband camps across the South. Her talk traces the migrations and settlement patterns of black refugees while elucidating the cross-cultural encounters that took place in the camps.

Enslaved Girlhoods: Gendering Terror, Human Trafficking, and Human Security

In this episode GLC Modern Slavery Fellow Wendy S. Hesford discusses a chapter titled “Enslaved Girlhoods: Gendering Terror, Human Trafficking, and Human Security” from her book-in-progress. Hesford examines the confluence of the discourses on sex slavery, human trafficking, and terrorism in the US media’s representation of the Islamic State’s enslavement of Yazidi women and girls and, more broadly, the gendering of terror and rescue in the international human rights imaginary.

Draft Resisters and the Enduring Myth of Canada as the Promise Land

Yale PhD candidate Wendell Adjetey discusses how US draft resisters in the 1960s and 1970s, especially African Americans, employed the myth of Canada as the Promised Land and the rhetorical use of the Underground Railroad.

The Brazilian Abolitionist Movement 

Angela Alonso, from the Department of Sociology at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, argues that the campaign for the abolition of slavery was Brazil’s first national social movement and that its success relied on the building of both national networks and contacts with the international abolitionist movement. 

Antislavery Sentiments and Other Socio-Racial Sensibilities in the Spanish Atlantic

In this episode Marcela Echeverri, an Assistant Professor of History at Yale University, spoke with Alejandro E. Gómez, Maître de conférences of Latin American History at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 and a fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center, about his research on the socio-racial perceptions of individuals within the Spanish Atlantic who advocated in favor of or against slavery, the slave trade and/or discrimination of free coloreds in the long 19th century. Gómez highlights changes and continuities over time regarding the social representations of Afro-descendants.  

 

A Deep History of the Earliest States

In this 2 part episode we join James Scott as he presents some of the main arguments in his upcoming book Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. This presentation was recorded at Yale University on April 13th, 2017. 

Walking While Black 

Garnette Cadogan, editor-at-large for Non-Stop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, reads his essay “Walking While Black,” originally published in Freeman’s, a literary magazine. The essay also appears in the The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race(Scribner, 2016) under the title “Black and Blue”.

 

The Remembrance of Slavery in Material Culture

James Walvin, Professor of History Emeritus at the University of York, discusses how traces of slavery are often overlooked in the material culture we value, from porcelain sugar bowls to mahogany tables.

Jamaica and the British Empire after the Morant Bay Rebellion

Christienna Fryar, an Assistant Professor of History at SUNY Buffalo State and a visiting fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center, discusses post-emancipation Jamaica, an era that scholars of British imperial history have defined as the three decades between full freedom in the 1830s and the Morant Bay Rebellion in 1865. Professor Fryer uses a series of particular disasters on the island to examine the British colonial administration’s response to key moments in the history of post-emancipation Jamaica. She suggests that emancipation was a much longer and less clearly defined process than typically understood.

Voting Rights and Voter Suppression in North Carolina 

Isela Gutierrez, the Associate Research Director for Democracy North Carolina and a speaker on the Gilder Lehrman Center’s “Right to Vote” panel discussion, talks about her organization’s work to protect the citizens of North Carolina against legislative actions and court decisions designed to abridge the right to vote, and what those struggles portend regarding the struggle to protect voting rights nationally.

The Moral Economy of Low Wage Women’s Work in the Global Anti-Trafficking Movement

Elena Shih, an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University and a visiting fellow at the Gilder Lehrman  Center, speaks about her work on human trafficking rescue efforts and the politics of labor, gender, and sexuality. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in China, Thailand, and the United States, Professor Shih argues that rescue programs create a transnational moral economy of low-wage women’s work, replacing traditional wage labor with affective commitments between First World rescuers and their “victims”.

Challenging the Legacy of Racial Inequality in America: the Work of the Equal Justice Initiative

David Blight speaks with Bryan Stevenson, the founding director of the Equal Justice Initiative and the author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Mr. Stevenson was here at Yale University to give the annual Parks-King Lecture at the Yale Divinity School. 

Mr. Stevenson is a widely acclaimed public interest lawyer who has dedicated his career to helping the poor, the incarcerated and the condemned.   Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill and aiding children prosecuted as adults.  Mr. Stevenson has successfully argued several cases in the United States Supreme Court and recently won an historic ruling that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger are unconstitutional.

Antislavery Sentiments and Experiences of African-Canadians During the Civil War Era 

Mathias Rodorff, a PhD candidate at the University of Munich and a visiting fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center, discusses his current work, which investigates why Nova Scotian newspapers paid such close attention to the contest in the United States over issues of slavery, emancipation, and equality while never considering how these issues might have played out in their province. Rodorff considers this in the context of other domestic events, like the heated debates over Nova Scotia’s role in the Canadian Confederation