Events

Events Calendar

Mar
22
Fri
3:30pm - 5:00pm
https://binghamton.zoom.us/j/98702395025
Presenter: Leigh Ann Wheeler, Prof. of History, Binghamton University Commentator: David J. Garrow, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Biography; author of Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama Join Zoom Meeting: https://binghamton.zoom.us/j/98702395025 This is an excerpt of a chapter from my biography of Anne Moody, author of the classic “civil rights” memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968). It retells the story of Anne’s sit-in at the segregated Woolworth lunch counter in Jackson in 1963, probably the most vivid scene from the book. I’m sharing both versions of this event—Anne’s and my own—so that we can talk about them as a case study but also to kick off a broader discussion. The biography begins before Anne’s birth in 1940 and extends beyond 1964, the year her memoir ends, to after her death in 2015. I’m encountering particular challenges while writing about the events Anne covered in her memoir. How does one write about the moments in a memoirist’s life that she has already documented? Specifically, how does one recount an event that the memoirist has already rendered so beautifully? What value can I add to the work she has already done? For other sections—not this one so much—I wonder how to handle discrepancies between Anne’s rendering and the documentary record. Should I assume they mean something and try to explain them? Should I instead assume Anne’s right—or wrong—and gloss over them in the text, saving discussion for the notes?
Apr
4
Thu
5:00pm - 7:00pm
UU-209
In the nineteenth century, settlers spread across North America with astonishing speed, dislodging Native peoples as they did. In this lecture, Daniel Immerwahr explores the environmental dimension of that. North America was (and is) unusual for its bounty of timber; the present-day United States is where the world's tallest, oldest, and largest trees all grow. This timber, Immerwahr argues, facilitated settler colonialism in two important ways. It attracted settlers and subsidized their activities, allowing them to build up their habitations quickly and cheaply. And it allowed them to not just evacuate but annihilate Native towns, with torches.
Apr
10
Wed
4:00pm - 6:00pm
UU-206
Dr. Laura Warren Hill, Associate Professor of Human Development, is a historian whose research focuses on race, social movements, power, and agency. Dr. Hill writes about the impacts of social inequality on people, communities and community formation. She is the author of Strike the Hammer: The Black Freedom Struggle in Rochester, NY, 1940-1970 (Cornell University Pression 2021) and the co-editor of The Business of Black Power: Community Development, Capitalism and Corporate Responsibility in the Postwar Era (University of Rochester Press, 2011). Both texts focus on the intersections between violence, civil rights and Black power, religion and the introduction of powerful new strategies to advance community formation and social movement goals. Her work has also appeared in The Journal of Civil and Human Rights; The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture; and in Black Perspectives, the African American Intellectual History Society blog. Dr. Hill is currently researching the life and wrongful conviction of Betty Tyson. Tyson, a self-proclaimed heroin addict and sex worker, was accused of murdering a corporate executive in 1973. Her ordeal spanned beyond 1998, when her conviction was finally overturned, marking her as the longest-serving woman inmate in the New York State prison system at the time. With this project, Dr. Hill examines the criminal justice system, underscoring its growing militarization in the age of exoneration. She questions the conspicuous absence of support from traditional social movement organizations for the most marginalized segments of society. Dr. Hill is also a founding member of the Upstate New York Policing Research Consortium (UNY-PRC), an affiliate of the Human Rights Institute. UNY-PRC is a collaborative of social justice and community-centered scholars conducting research in order to question and inform policing practices and build community engagement across upstate New York. https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501756047/strike-the-hammer/
Apr
19
Fri
3:30pm - 5:00pm
https://binghamton.zoom.us/j/98597232960
Presenter: Alison Parker, Richards Professor of American History, University of Delaware Commentator: Leigh Ann Wheeler, Prof. of History, Binghamton University Join Zoom Meeting: https://binghamton.zoom.us/j/98597232960 This paper briefly explores the letters of girls and young women to Mary Church Terrell, a leading Black civil rights activist and suffragist from the 1890s through the early 1950s. While researching my biography of Terrell, Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell, I read many letters in her correspondence files asking for help, advice, and support, or to speak or write, often on behalf of a particular activist project or set of ideas. However, for the book, I mainly focused on her correspondence with family members, friends, and prominent individuals, rather than strangers. I was invited to participate in a conference at the University of Vienna this Fall on the subject of “Supportive Practices? Letters to Social Movement Activists.” The conference (and subsequent planned edited volume) asked scholars to think about what motivated strangers to write to prominent social movement activists like Terrell. I argue that the letters to Terrell from girls and young women who aimed to set up Mary Church Terrell Clubs can be characterized as part of an “imperative of self-emancipation.”
Apr
26
Fri
3:30pm - 5:00pm
https://binghamton.zoom.us/j/93093594947
Presenters: Katie M. Hemphill, Associate Professor of History, University of Arizona Commentator: Amanda Hendrix-Komoto, Join Zoom Meeting: https://binghamton.zoom.us/j/93093594947