The Center is pleased to present this exhibit of photographs that reveal some of the striking beauty and complex history that make North Carolina a compelling place to live and work. Joel Elliott and Richard Schramm have spent years traveling around the state and the Southeast capturing images that reveal the complex character of this region and its people in details that we might otherwise miss.
Over the last decade, award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal has revitalized the study of early America’s marginalized voices. Now, in Independence Lost, she recounts an untold story as rich and significant as that of the Founding Fathers: the history of the Revolutionary Era as experienced by slaves, American Indians, women, and British loyalists living on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
September 30–October 28, 2020 | The next series of the National Humanities Center's popular Virtual Book Club will examine our democracy—its history, accomplishments, failings, and current challenges. This series will explore if and how the framers’ vision of humanistic values in American principles has been sustained as well as the aspirations and fallibilities inherent in the continuous struggle for “the soul of America.”
In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women’s movement did not win the vote for most Black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own. In Vanguard, historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women’s political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons.
The second book in an experimental triptych, M Archive is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following the worldwide cataclysm we are living through now. By exploring how Black feminist theory is already after the end of the world, Alexis Pauline Gumbs reinscribes the possibilities and potentials of scholarship while demonstrating the impossibility of demarcating the lines between art, science, spirit, scholarship, and politics.
Kim F. Hall leads a discussion of the role of Shakespeare in constructions of Blackness and race; the appropriation of Shakespeare by Black communities; the policing of canonical literature along racial lines; and the race and gender politics of the American stage and popular media. She suggests that we learn much about modern Blackness from how Afrodiasporic peoples evoke, appropriate, and contest “Shakespeare” in their quest to make legible new political Black identities.
Martin Summers argues that assumptions about the existence of distinctive black and white psyches shaped the therapeutic and diagnostic regimes in Saint Elizabeths hospital and left a legacy of poor treatment of African American patients, even after psychiatrists had begun to reject racialist conceptions of the psyche. Yet black patients and their communities asserted their own agency and exhibited a “rights consciousness” in large and small ways, from agitating for more equal treatment to attempting to manage the therapeutic experience.
Brenda Stevenson explores the long-simmering resentment within LA's Black community that ultimately erupted in April 1992 by focusing on a preceding event that encapsulated the city's growing racial and social polarization: the 1991 shooting of a fifteen-year old African American girl, Latasha Harlins, by a Korean grocer who suspected her of shoplifting. Stevenson provides a meticulous account of the case and its aftermath, and uses the lives of the three protagonists to explore the intertwined histories of three immigrant ethnic groups who arrived in Los Angeles in different eras: Blacks, Koreans, and Jews.
Racial injustice courses deeply through American history. In 2020, demands for rights and racial equality are at the center of renewed calls for decisive policy action in response to law enforcement brutality and systemic racism. The size, composition, and sustained nature of nationwide protests suggest it’s different this time. Is it? What kind of moment is this? Join Clayborne Carson, Douglas McAdam, and Brenda Stevenson in conversation with Xavier de Souza Briggs as they explore how insights from America’s distant and near past can inform the possibilities for durable, transformational change in our time.
Sisters and Rebels follows the divergent paths of the Lumpkin sisters, who were “estranged and yet forever entangled” by their mutual obsession with the South. Tracing the wounds and unsung victories of the past through to the contemporary moment, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall revives a buried tradition of Southern expatriation and progressivism; explores the lost, revolutionary zeal of the early twentieth century; and muses on the fraught ties of sisterhood.