Osnaburg Fabric: Garment for the Enslaved

It was the osnaburg nightshirt that failed to keep Moses Grandy’s enslaved brother warm when he died of exposure while trying to find a yoke of steers that had wandered into woods of the Great Dismal Swamp during the winter of 1795. That coarse, yet thin fabric had not been enough to keep the enslaved …

Art Break: Elizabeth Catlett’s Art Legacy

"The granddaughter of former slaves, Catlett was raised in Washington, D.C. Her father died before she was born and her mother held several jobs to raise three children. Refused admission to Carnegie Institute of Technology because of her race, Catlett enrolled at Howard University, where her teachers included artist Loïs Mailou Jones and philosopher Alain Locke. She …

Art Break: Remembering Charles Dawson’s Graphic Artwork

"One of Chicago's leading black artists and designers in the 1920s and '30s, Charles Clarence Dawson is best known for his illustrated advertisements for beauty schools and products, such as Annie Malone's Poro College and Valmor Products, which were targeted to the city's burgeoning black population. Enterprising, self-assured and a tireless “Race Man,” Dawson made …

Notes on David Blackbourn’s “Conquest of Nature”

“The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany,” by David Blackbourn tells the story of how Germans transformed their landscape over the course  of 250 years.[1] The modification of the landscape included reclaiming marshes, draining wetlands, stream restoration, and dam construction. These hydrological projects, Blackbourn informs, changed the face of the …

Reconstructing the structure of cultural assertion: Kadesh AME Zion Church in Edenton, NC

In September 2003 when Hurricane Isabel ravaged the eastern NC coast and traveled inland to Edenton, NC it left insurmountable effects of damages in its wake. It was a tremendous loss for the two-hundred and ninety-one year old town as most of the local economy depended on historic tourism.  As the town began to rebound …

Jazz Break: Vijay Iyer Trio

An historian is also a writer and given the rigors of the daily grind, personal commitments, and other distractions it can often be difficult to clear the mind to write. For me, I am most productive when I am in a cafe with music in my ear. It is not so simple however - it …

Notes on Darwin’s Origin of Species

  The nineteenth century was rife with cataclysmic changes in economics, technology, and science. An increasingly diversified market of goods and services, new inventions, and population shifts were just some aspects of the rapid innovation and progress made during the 1800's. Additionally the ideological discourses thrived with print material that challenged, provoked and brought new …

Art Break: Simone Leigh’s method of concealment and visibility

"Through ceramics, Leigh references vernacular visual traditions from the Caribbean, the American South, and the African continent, as well as the Afro Descendant diasporic experience dating from the Middle Passage to the present. Vessels, cowrie shells, and busts are reoccurring forms, each making symbolic reference to the black body." Read the full article by clicking …

ART BREAK: Jessica Rankin’s Mental Maps

"Jessica Rankin’s work might best be described as ‘mental maps’. Working on a sheer fabric called organdie, her images invoke cartography or geographic diagrams. Made from thousands of tiny embroidered stitches, Rankin delineates shapes, boundaries, and contours, interconnecting and locating them with miniscule text. In Hour To Hour, which incorporates 4 gossamer swatches, Rankin’s constellation …

Notes on Thomas Rogers’ Deepest Wounds

Thomas Rogers’ “The Deepest Wounds: Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil” expands our knowledge in understanding the rupture, continuity and change in the zona da mata region of Brazil. Rogers’ foremost concern in the book is assessing the damage that monoculture did to landscape and society in the region as well as …

1890 Shaler Map- Crude Georeference

In my pursuit of locating pertinent GIS data for my historical inquiry I contacted Fred Wurster a hydrologist at the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. Over the past year he and I have corresponded about conservation efforts, environmental policy, and geographic information specific to the refuge. Last week (week of July 4) I visited …

Notes on Kate Brown’s Plutopia

Kate Brown presents the first decisive account of the major plutonium disasters of the United States and the Soviet Union in “Plutopia : Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters.”  Drawing on interpretation gleaned from government records as well as oral testimonies Brown tells an astounding story of two nuclear …