Call for Papers
Conference on Race, Labor & Citizenship in the Post-Emancipation South
Charleston, March 11-13, 2010
College of Charleston
Charleston, South Carolina
Keynote by Steven Hahn, author of the prize-winning A Nation Under Our Feet:Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
Rationale: One hundred years ago the outstanding African American scholar-activist, W. E. B. Du Bois, presented to the American Historical Association a paper entitled Reconstruction and Its Benefits. In the paper and in his seminal Black Reconstruction, published a quarter century later, Du Bois not only exposed the racial assumptions underpinning the then dominant view of the period following slave emancipation: he insisted that the struggles over slavery and the shape of the freedom that followed were central to the history of America's working people, calling it "the kernel and meaning of the labor movement in the United States." Over the past generation, historians have built upon Du Bois's powerful insight about the connections between race, labor and citizenship in the post-emancipation South, producing some of the most compelling scholarship in the field of U. S. history.
The After Slavery Project, a transatlantic research collaboration based at Queen's University Belfast, welcomes proposals from scholars at all levels for individual papers and panels that showcase new and developing research on these and related themes across the former slave South, between the end of the Civil War and the early years of the twentieth century. As part of our commitment to making this scholarship widely available to teachers and students outside of higher education, labor and community activists, and interested citizens, we invite proposals for teachers workshops and panels that attempt to link new scholarship and public/popular history and/or online learning.
Suggested topics include:
- Labor and the Politics of Reconstruction
- Freedwomen, Citizenship and the Public Sphere
- Freedom, Property Rights and the Land Question in the Postwar South
- Black Workers, the Union Leagues and the Republican Party
- White Supremacy and the Prospects for Interracialism
- The Franchise and Grassroots Political Activism
- Coercion, Paramilitary Violence and Resistance
- Emigration Movements and Black Mobility
- Gender and the Free Labor Vision
- Religion and Southern Laborers
- Dockworkers, Port Cities and Black Mobilization
- Race Leadership after 'Redemption'
- Populism and the Color Line
- Agricultural and Urban Labor
- Race, Labor and New South Industrialization
- Independent Politics after 1880
Details are available online at [url]http://www.afterslavery.com[/url]
Proposals (limit 200 words/paper) should be submitted by November 20, 2009 either electronically to [mailto]charlestonconference@afterslavery.com[/mailto] or by completing the online form at the After Slavery [url]http://www.afterslavery.com> website[/url]
Conference Organizers:
- Brian Kelly, Queen's University Belfast
- Susan E. O'Donovan, University of Memphis
- Bruce E. Baker, Royal Holloway-University of London
- Bernard E. Powers Jr., College of Charleston
- Simon K. Lewis, College of Charleston (CLAW)
- Kerry Taylor, The Citadel
Organized by the After Slavery Project. Co-sponsored by the Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World (CLAW); the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture (College of Charleston); the (SC) African American Historical Alliance; School of Humanities and Social Sciences (The Citadel) and the Southern Labor Studies Association. Other supporting organizations: Center for the Study of the American South (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill); Institute for Southern Studies (University of South Carolina at Columbia); Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA); Charleston International Longshoremen's Association Local 1422; The Citadel Oral History Program; W. E. B. Du Bois Institute (Harvard University). The After Slavery Project is funded by the (UK) Arts and Humanities Research Council