To Disparage John Brown and Quash the New Negro: Troubled Confederate Commemoration 1920

For Confederate Memorial Associations maintaining the distinctive social arrangements based on race was central to their survival. These values and beliefs protected the power of the dominant class (patrician southern whites) by infusing the Lost Cause into the minds of the public. In periods of social change their presence would amplify with commemoration activities. Amidst …

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: 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 …

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 …

Invited Lecture: Mapping Movements and Memory

My friend and colleague Dave Tell at the University of Kansas was kind enough to recommend my work to Paul Stob at Vanderbilt. Because of this referral Stob invited me to share my work on counter-mapping enslaved flight within the Great Dismal Swamp. I learned a great deal from everyone there and met some excellent …