NEWS: Harvard to Digitize 18th and 19th Century Anti-Slavery Petitions
The Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University is digitizing eighteenth and nineteenth-century anti-slavery petitions:
“…Included in the thousands of petitions are first-person accounts of former slaves and free African-Americans seeking aid and full rights. For scholars, the use of the documents will be invaluable in research and teaching….
…According to project archivist Nicole Topich, signers of the petitions include 18th-century abolitionist Prince Hall, the founder of the first African-American Freemasonry.
Read the post: http://diasporahypertext.com/2013/05/23/news-harvard-to-digitize-18th-and-19th-century-anti-slavery-petitions/
Valérie Nivelon / RFI on the International Colloquium ‘Saint-Louis du Sénégal to New Orleans (Part II)’
Below are two broadcasts by Radio France International‘s Valérie Nivelon covering last April’s historic colloque Saint-Louis du Sénégal to New Orleans, Louisiana: Two Mirror Cities for Le Marche du Monde (Walk of the World).
The exchanges, sites, and sounds–too intense for me to describe here. But Nivelon does.
Tagged: atlantic world, conferences, diaspora, ehess, history, saint louis to nola, slavery, tulane, ucad
Read the post: http://bit.ly/10iTDG5
Foreman: (Dis)Remembering Black Women’s Lives
Summer is here and look what I found in my Evernote archive.
This 2011 video essay by P. Gabrielle Foreman reflects on the social justice labor of love that is collecting, archiving, and cataloging black women’s history.
My interest in history began around my grandmothers’ kitchen tables, needling them to frustration for information on ‘who our people are.’ The featured image is from my personal photo archive. You might call it an alternative archive (#altarchive) of Chicago in the 1980s. But the Afro-Atlantic is marked by horizontal and vertical trails–migration, displacement, and deep roots–all operating in tandem with memories of home and hope for the future. Neither passive nor timid, and powered by real work and bodies (work and bodies often gendered female), collecting memories, photos, trinkets, and stories activates homespace in the Afro-Atlantic. It is not such a far cry from that to ‘activating the archive,’ as described by Foreman.
Yes, when I steal photos from my mother or badger my aunt about this or that distant relative I never met, I am gathering an #altarchive. But what I’m really doing is gathering and remaking myself whole.
Tagged: feminism, history, rwoc, social justice, summer 2013
Read the post: http://bit.ly/17XZKHj
