Penn State Host of National Symposium on the Emancipation Proclamation
UNIVERSITY PARK, PA—To celebrate and mark the occasion of Penn State's hosting a rare wartime printing of the Emancipation Proclamation, the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center hosted a “Symposium on the Emancipation Proclamation” on April 14, 2007.
The daylong event featured seven internationally recognized scholars with expertise on Abraham Lincoln and emancipation, addressing Lincoln's view of citizenship, the considerations of enslaved and freedpeople towards Lincoln, and the implications of emancipation on gender, religion, and the law.
The program included pairs of speakers in four sessions, two before lunch, and two afterward. Speakers presented their work before taking questions from respondents and attendees.
The event occurred at the Nittany Lion Inn's Faculty Staff Club, on Penn State 's University Park campus, from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, April 14.
The speakers, their topics, and their brief biographies follow below.
The “Symposium on the Emancipation Proclamation” was part of the annual Brose Lecture Series and will generate a book published by the University of North Carolina Press. The symposium was also sponsored by the Department of History and Religious Studies Program, the Special Collections Library, and the College of the Liberal Arts.
SPEAKERS, TOPICS, BIOGRAPHIES:
Richard Carwardine presented “Lincoln, the Union Churches, and Emancipation.” Dr. Cawardine is the Rhodes Professor of American History at the University of Oxford. His work focuses on the Abraham Lincoln, and the place of evangelical Protestantism in nineteenth-century America. In 2004 he became the first British scholar to win the prestigious Lincoln Prize, America 's most generous award in the field of history, for his book Lincoln. He is also the author of Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America.
Louis S. Gerteis' lecture was entitled, “Slave, Servants and Soldiers: The Uneven Path to Freedom in the Border States, 1861–1865.” Dr. Gerteis is Professor of History at the University of Missouri–St. Louis where he also serves as chair of the Department of History. His most recent publication is Civil War St. Louis. He has also written on the antislavery movement and federal policy toward the freedpeople.
Steven Hahn discussed the mindset of slaves regarding Lincoln. Dr. Hahn is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History at The University of Pennsylvania. He is a specialist on the history of the American South and on the comparative history of slavery and emancipation. He is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Nation Under our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. His numerous publications also include The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890, which received both the Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American History and the Frederick Jackson Turner Award of the Organization of American Historians.
Stephanie McCurry lectured about how slave women understood their role in emancipation. Merriam Associate Professor of History at The University of Pennsylvania, Dr. McCurry specializes in nineteenth-century America and gender history, as well as southern and political history. McCurry's book, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country received five awards, including the Francis Butler Simkins Award for the Best First Book in Southern History, the Charles S. Sydnor Award, and the John Hope Franklin Prize for the Best Book in American Studies.
Julie Saville talked about post-emancipation political fantasies of slave emancipation. She is associate professor of history at The University of Chicago. Saville's research focuses on African-American and Caribbean history and she is the author of The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860–1870. She was a co-editor on Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867. She is at work on a study of slaves' political culture in the French Caribbean in the aftermath of the French and Haitian revolutions.
Michael Vorenberg's talk was entitled “From Slave to ‘Fellow Citizen': Lincoln 's View.” Associate professor of history at Brown University, Dr. Vorenberg is the author of Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment. He specializes in legal and constitutional history and slavery, emancipation, and race. In 2005, he was named “Top Young Historian” by History News Network.
Heather Williams spoke on enslaved and freedpeople's impressions of Lincoln. Dr. Williams is assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. Williams holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. She is the author of Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom.