The University of Texas History Department is pleased to announce that Professor Victoria E. Bynum will deliver the annual 2012 Littlefield Lectures.
Black Amateur Photography
The passion for recording our lives, fostered today by the availability of simple digital cameras and posting sites like Flickr, has a long history. African American leaders very early on understood the uses of photography for both self-expression and political struggle. Leigh Raiford notes, in her book Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle, that Sojourner Truth supported her cause by selling photos of herself at lectures and Frederick Douglass wanted to use photography to portray black life more accurately.
African American History Online
If Digital History is “using new technologies to enhance research and teaching,” as the excellent website from the University of Houston puts it, then African American history is being well-served digitally. In honor of African American History month, I survey here one enormous and useful website that gives us all access to a very wide variety of materials.
The Freedmen’s Bureau: Work After Emancipation
In March 1865, the U. S. Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau for Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to ease the transition between slavery and freedom for 3.5 million newly liberated slaves. The bureau had three main functions—to distribute rations to Southerners who had been loyal to the Union during the Civil War, to establish public schools for black children and adults, and to oversee labor contracts between landowners and black workers.
Signs of Faith
One ongoing project of mine has been to photograph signs of spiritual life visible on the roads and highways of America.
Undergraduate Essay Contest Honorable Mention: Beirut City Center Recovery: The Foch-Allenby and Etoile Conservation Area by Robert Saliba (2004)
The city of Beirut witnessed a legendary amount of violence during the fifteen year long Lebanese Civil War. News programs the world over broadcast it into the homes of millions of people from 1975 till the Lebanese Parliament ratified the Taif accord in late 1989.
Undergraduate Essay Contest Winner: Homage to Catalonia (1938)
George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is an interesting work.
Great Books on La Violencia in Guatemala
Two unusual books on civil war violence in Guatemala
On Veterans’ Day: War Photos
Photographs of war, more than photographs of any other subject, make war seem both very distant and impossibly close.
Great Books on Enslaved Life and Labor in the US
Classic studies, the newest works, and a few novels on labor and gender and the institutions of slavery in the United States.