Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery Hosts Lecture Series at Yale

Throughout this academic year the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University is hosting a series of talks on different aspects of slavery. The series is organized around the two themes of “Slavery and Race in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Early Modern Period,” and “Slavery and Founders of the American Republic.”

On September 29, Hillhouse Professor of Classics and History Donald Kagan opens the lecture series with “Slavery in the Ancient World.” Kagan is speaking at the Slifka Center Chapel, 80 Wall Street.

The next speaker in the series, Hugh Davis of Southern Connecticut State University, will talk about his biography of the 19th-century religious leader and journalist, Leonard Bacon. The lecture, “Leonard Bacon and the Antislavery Movement in New Haven and the North,” will be on October 6.

“Survivors of the Middle Passage: Autobiographical Accounts by Enslaved Africans in British America,” will be given by Jerome Handler of the Virginia Historical Commission on November 10. Benjamin Braude of Boston College will speak about early European conceptions of “The Curse of Ham” on November 17.

“The Mask of Obedience: Slave Psychology in the Old South” lecture will be delivered on January 12 by Bertram Wyatt-Brown of the University of Florida.

On February 9, Jennifer Baszile of Yale University will speak on slavery and settlement rivalry in southeastern North America from 1670-1741.

Talks by Paul Lovejoy of York University on February 16 and by Patrick Manning of Northeastern University on February 23 will be co-sponsored with the Yale African Studies Council.

On March 29, Dalton Conley of Yale University, author of the recently published, “Being Black, Living in the Red,” will talk about race and property rights after Emancipation, and on April 12 Sylvia Frey of Tulane University will deliver the last lecture of the series, “Slavery and the American Revolution.”

All events are at 4:15 P.M. in Room 203 of Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue, unless otherwise specified, and all are free and open to the public. For late updates, see the Gilder Lehrman Center website: www.yale.edu/glc.

Also to be noted: October 22-24, 1999, marks the First Annual Gilder Lehrman Center International Conference: “Domestic Passages: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas, 1808-1888.” Investigating the domestic slave trades within Brazil, the British West Indies and the United States South, this conference will take place both at Yale University and Mystic Seaport. Consult the website, www.yale.edu/glc, for the schedule and registration form.

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition was launched at Yale in November 1998 through a donation by the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History. Its mission is to promote the study of all aspects of the Atlantic slave system, including African and African American resistance to enslavement, abolitionist movements, and the ways in which chattel slavery finally became outlawed. In addition to encouraging the highest standards of new scholarship, the Center is dedicated to the dissemination of knowledge through publications, conferences, educational outreach, and other activities.