Wachovia Lecture Series

• Friday, March 4, 2011, 6:30 pm
  James McPherson (Princeton University) with an introduction by Vernon Burton (Clemson University)

Stern Student Center Ballroom, 71 George Street

James McPherson is the George Henry Davis '86 Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. He has published numerous volumes on the Civil War, including the Pulitzer Prizewinning Battle Cry of Freedom, Crossroads of Freedom (which was a New York Times bestseller), Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, and For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, which won the Lincoln Prize.

• Thursday, April 22, 2010
  Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South

Arnold Hall, Jewish Studies Center, 96 Wentworth Street

Dr. Ford is a professor of history and chair of the department at the University of South Carolina. A major contribution to our understanding of slavery in the early republic, Deliver Us from Evil illuminates the white South's twisted and tortured efforts to justify slavery, focusing on the period from the drafting of the federal constitution in 1787 through the age of Jackson. He also shows that there was not one antebellum South but many, and not one Southern white mindset but several, with the debates over slavery in the upper South quite different in substance from those in the deep South.

• Thursday, October 14, 2010
  Dean Hall: Historical Archaeology at a Nineteenth-Century Cooper River Rice Plantation

Johnson Center, Room 206, 28 George Street

Members of Brockington and Associates, a cultural resource management company in Mt. Pleasant, will be giving a public lecture on recent work at Dean Hall Plantation in Berkeley County, South Carolina. Charles Philips, Jr., senior historian, will present the history of Dean Hall Plantation. Andrew Agha, senior archaeologist, will discuss the recent excavations, which uncovered over 125,000 artifacts, including 59,000 Colonoware sherds. Nicole Isenbarger, lab supervisor, will discuss the significance of the found artifacts and Colonoware. Analysis of these sherds has helped shed light on the folkways of the enslaved people at Dean Hall plantation. This event is co-sponsored by the Addlestone Friends of the Library.

• Thursday, February 19, 2009
  The Age of Lincoln: Was Lincoln a Southerner

Alumni Hall, Randolph Hall, College of Charleston

On the bicentenary of Lincoln's birth our executive director Dr, O. Vernon Burton, Burroughs Distinguished Professor of Southern History at Coastal Carolina University will give a lecture on our 16th President. His recent book The Age of Lincoln won the 2007 Heartland Prize for Non-Fiction and is earning rave reviews, typified by this opening paragraph by John David Smith for bookpage.com: "If the Civil War era was America's Iliad, then historian Orville Vernon Burton is our latest Homer, Burton is best known for his widely acclaimed In My Father's House Are Many Mansions (1985), a brilliantly nuanced social history of Edgefield County, South Carolina. With The Age of Lincoln, Burton has significantly widened his lens, ratcheted up his analysis and produced a magisterial narrativc history of American social and intellectual life from the age of slavery up to the era of Jim Crow, New details, fresh insights and sparkling interpretations punctuate nearly every page of Burton's fast-paced and elegantly written new book."

• Thursday, September 7, 2009
  Dr. Jack Bass (The Citadel) and Dr. W. Scott Poole (Department of History, College of Charleston) Rice Plantation

Arnold Hall, Jewish Studies Center, 96 Wentworth Street

Joint authors of The Palmetto State: The Making of Modern South Carolina, hot off the press from the University of South Carolina Press, Professors Bass and Poole will give a lecture about their new book and about the history and historiography of South Carolina. Dr. Bass is one of the state's best known journalists whose published work includes books on Senator Strom Thurmond and on the Orangeburg Massacre. Dr. Poole's books include the award-winning Never Surrender: Confederate Memory and Conservatism in the South Carolina Upcountry (University of Georgia Press, 2004) and South Carolina's Civil War (Mercer. 2005).

• Thursday, October 8, 2009
  Dr. James Walvin, University of York (UK)

Arnold Hall, Jewish Studies Center, 96 Wentworth Street

James Walvin, who taught for many years at the University of York (UK) is one of the world's leading authorities on the history of slavery and the slave trade. He has a prolific publishing record, including the 2007 book The Trader, the Owncr, the Slave and the Martin Luther King Memorial Prizewinning book Black and White. Professor Walvin's lecture will be on the notorious Zong massacre, an event in 1781 when 133 slaves were thrown, alive, from a slave ship as a storm approached. The case is the topic of Professor Walvin's most recently completed manuscript and allows him to consider what the incident and the public response to it tells us about the slave trade in general and the changing sensibility about slavery itself towards the end of the eighteenth century.

• January 2006
  Dr. Markus Rediker, University of Pittsburgh

Dr. Markus Rediker is professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and author of numerous books and articles and is much in demand as an expert on naval and maritime history in the Atlantic world in the 18th and 19th centuries. His lecture will discuss piracy in the Atlantic world.

• November 2005
  Dr. Stephanie Yuhl, Holy Cross University

Dr. Stephanie Yuhl is professor of history at Holy Cross University and author of A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2005). Her lecture will discuss her work on the historic preservation movement in Charleston.

• February 20, 2004
  The Transplantation of European Culture to North America: French and Spanish Mission Strategies

Lecture given by John Corrigan, Edwin Scott Gaustad Professor of Religion and Professor of History; Director, Center for the Study of Emotion, Florida State University.
Introduced by Margaret Cormack, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, College of Charleston

• February 20, 2003
  Sons of Carolina?

Professor Vincent Carretta of the Department of the English Language and Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park, will deliver a Wachovia Foundation public lecture entitled "Sons of Carolina?". The talk will treat several Anglo-African and African American writers who resided for periods of time in South Carolina during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Carretta is the editor of several volumes of writings that explore the black literary traditions of the eighteenth century, including Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic (with Philip Gould, Univ. of KY, 2001), Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Univ. of KY, 1996), and The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings by Olaudah Equiano (Viking, 1995).

• Wednesday, April 12, 2000
  The End of Duels: The Aftermath of Confederate Defeat in South Carolina

Lecture by Bertram Wyatt-Brown

• Thursday, April 27, 2000
  The Carolina Lowcountry and Three English-Speaking Civil Wars: 1640-49, 1775-83, 1861-65

Lecture by Kevin Phillips

• February 10, 1999
  White Over Black After Three Decades: A Retrospective of Winthrop Jordan's White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812, Winner of the 1969 Nationa1 Book Award.

Thirty years ago, Professor Jordan's magisterial work, exploring the origin and development of white attitudes toward African Americans from the 16th century to the early years of the republic, won the coveted National Book Award. Even before the first blacks set foot in Jamestown in 1619, English colonists had already acquired a complex set of attitudes toward Africans. Drawn from religion, from traditional folk beliefs, and from earlier contacts with Africa, these beliefs grew to create a cruel and tragic dichotomy - the concept of "liberty and justice for all" and "the white man's country." His history of the debasement of African Americans remains the most thorough and learned discussion of a topic central to America's past, present, and future. Join us as three historians discuss the importance and continuing impact of Professor Jordan's controversial study.

Panelists: Winthrop Jordan (University of Mississippi), Daniel C. Littlefield (University of Illinois), Jennifer Morgan (Rutgers University), James Sidbury (University of Texas)

• October 8, 1999
  Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830

How and when did African Americans become Christians? Frey and Wood will address this important topic in a comparative lecture that depicts religious transformation as a complex reciprocal movement involving both black and white Christians. They highlight the important role of black preachers and women in developing distinctive rituals and moral values within the African American community.

Sylvia Frey, Professor of History at Tulane University, is a member of the Program's Advisory Board. She and Betty Wood, Lecturer in History, Girton College, Cambridge University, are co-authors of Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1998).

• October 1, 1998
  Reassessing Colonial South Carolina History: Peter Wood's Black Majority After 25 Years

This symposium will mark the 25th anniversary of the publication of Peter H. Wood's Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. No other single volume has had such a profound effect upon the historiography of the colonial Lower South.

Panelists: David Shields (English Department, The Citadel), Robert Olwell (History Department, University of Texas), Philip Morgan (History Department and The William and Mary Quarterly, College of William and Mary)

Response: Peter Wood (History Department, Duke University)

 

Creating The Atlantic World

• Thursday, February 19, 1998
  The Atlantic Archipelago: British History and the American Seaboard

Lecture by J.G.A. Pocock

J.G.A. Pocock, Black Professor Emeritus of History at The Johns Hopkins University, was educated at the University of New Zealand and at Cambridge University. He received an honorary degree from the University of Canterbury in 1973.

• Friday, March 20, 1998
  Finding the Red Thread: The Atlantic Moment in Culture and History"

Lecture by Sidney W. Mintz

Sidney W. Mintz is the Straus Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at The Johns Hopkins University. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1951.

Creating The Atlantic World

• Thursday, October 9, 1997
  The Idea of Atlantic History

Lecture by Bernard Bailyn

Bernard Bailyn is a premier historian of colonial America. Bailyn completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1953 and joined the faculty there, where he is now Adams University Professor Emeritus.

• Thursday, November 14, 1997
  Anticipations of Racism: Ambivalent Images of Africans in the Early Modern Age

Lecture by David Brion Davis

David Brion Davis is the Sterling Professor of History at Yale University. He will present an illustrated lecture exploring the origins of racism in the Atlantic World.