Amazing Free Conference on The Antislavery Origins of the Civil War

Pat Young

Brev. Brig. Gen'l
Featured Book Reviewer
Joined
Jan 7, 2013
Location
Long Island, NY
The Antislavery Bulwark: The Antislavery Origins of the Civil War

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Details
WHERE:

The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue

ROOM:

1201: Elebash Recital Hall

WHEN:

October 17, 2014: 6:30 PM

ADMISSION:

Free; first-come, first-served

Description
Bringing together the best new scholarship in the field, “The Antislavery Bulwark: The Antislavery Origins of the Civil War” points toward an important new way of thinking about the origins of the Civil War. The conference considers how the activities of antislavery Americans ultimately contributed to Southern secession and war. It places less emphasis on the radical abolitionist “vanguard” than on the broader antislavery movement, especially antislavery politics, stressing the common objects and premises of an often divided crusade. The larger intellectual goal is to reaffirm the strength and significance of antislavery politics in the early national and antebellum eras. Topics include the origins and significance of the Somerset case, the legal and political ramifications of the “first emancipation,” and antislavery politics in the new nation from the Missouri Crisis to the fugitive slave crisis of the 1850s and the election of 1860.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE:

Friday, October 17

6:30 pm - 7:30 pm:

Conference Introduction: Chase Robinson, President, CUNY Graduate Center

Keynote Address: David W. Blight, Yale University

Saturday, October 18

9 am – 9:15 am:

Introduction: James Oakes, CUNY Graduate Center

9:15 am – 10:30 am:

SESSION ONE: ANTISLAVERY IN THE REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIODS

Presiding: Christopher Brown, Columbia University

The Making of an Antislavery Generation: The Children of Gradual Emancipation, Antislavery Legal Culture, and the “General” Abolition of 1827
John Blanton, CUNY Graduate Center

The Making of an Antislavery Generation: The Children of Gradual Emancipation and Early American Legal Culture
Sarah Levine-Gronningsater, McNeil Center for Early American Studies/California Institute of Technology

The Origins of the Cordon of Freedom: The Radicalism of Rufus King’s Missouri Crisis Speeches
David Gary, Yale University

10:45 am – 12 pm:

SESSION TWO: ABOLITIONISM AND ANTISLAVERY POLITICS IN THE ANTEBELLUM ERA

Presiding: Amy Dru Stanley, University of Chicago

The Slave Power Argument and Abolitionist Partisan Politics
Corey Brooks, York College of Pennsylvania

Garrisonian Abolitionists and the Half-Way House of Antislavery Politics
Caleb McDaniel, Rice University

Absolute and Unqualified Divorce: Salmon P. Chase and the Radicalism of the Antislavery Platform
Joe Murphy, CUNY Graduate Center

12 pm – 1:30 pm: Break for Lunch

1:30 pm – 2:45 pm:

SESSION THREE: POLITICAL CRISIS OF THE 1850s

Presiding: Sean Wilentz, Princeton University

The Underground Railroad Reconsidered: Antebellum Politics and the Challenges of Counting Fugitive Slaves and Their Allies
Matthew Pinsker, Dickinson College

The Van and the Rear: Abolition and the Politics of Antislavery
Manisha Sinha, University of Massachusetts Amherst

The King’s Cure: Lincoln, State Abolition, and the Origins of the Thirteenth Amendment
James Oakes, CUNY Graduate Center

3 pm – 4:30 pm:

PANEL DISCUSSION: IMPLICATIONS

Moderator: Catherine Clinton, University of Texas San Antonio

Speakers:

Eric Foner, Columbia University
James McPherson, Princeton University
James Brewer Stewart, Macalester College

NO RESERVATIONS REQUIRED. For more information, call 212-817-8215.

- See more at: http://www.gc.cuny.edu/Public-Programming/Calendar/Detail?id=26955#sthash.492T7TJ6.dpuf
 
That's a weekend at NYC, correct (place was never mentioned in any of the links other than inferred from that graphic in that poster, sorry.) ?
 
That's a weekend at NYC, correct (place was never mentioned in any of the links other than inferred from that graphic in that poster, sorry.) ?
Yes, sorry. It is at the City University of New York Graduate Center in Manhattan. "Autumn in New York".
 
I'd love to be there, but unfortunately can't. How good are you at taking notes, Pat? :smile:
I am going to try to get there. My experience is that these history events in NYC draw big crowds, so even if I go I may not get in.
 
I am going to give a little background on some of the scholars with info from their sites:
  • Sarah Levine-Gronningsater won the 2012 Preyer Prize for her paper “Poor Law, Slave Law, God’s Law: Quaker Antislavery and the Early Modern Origins of New York’s Gradual Emancipation." She recently received her PhD from the University of Chicago.
 
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Christopher L. Brown is a Professor at Columbia University. He has his Phd from Oxford.

He "specializes in the history of eighteenth century Britain, the early modern British Empire, and the comparative history of slavery and abolition, with secondary interests in the age of revolutions and the history of the Atlantic world. He is now at work on two projects, one on British experience along the West African coast in the era of the Atlantic slave trade, and a second on the decline and fall of the British Planter class in the era of abolition and emancipation."
 
Here is another bio:

Amy Dru Stanley's research and teaching focus on US history, from the early Republic through the Progressive Era. She is especially interested in the history of capitalism, slavery, and emancipation, and the historical experience of moral problems. Methodologically, she works at the intersections of intellectual, social, and legal history. Current interests extend to visual culture.

She has received various fellowships and awards, including a University of Chicago Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate teaching in 2009 and a Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching in 2005.

Her current and former PhD students work on issues ranging from slavery and memory, risk, and urban space to marriage, civil rights, working women, consumer culture, the free press, temperance, tax policy, mental health, and criminal law.

Selected Publications
Love, Commerce, and Abolition:The Peculiar Path of Human Rights in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming

From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
From Bondage to Contract has received the following prizes:

  • Frederick Jackson Turner Prize, 1999 (For the best first book in US History, awarded by the Organization of American Historians)
  • Morris D. Forkosch Award, 1999 (For the best book in intellectual history)
  • Avery O. Craven Award, 1999 (For the best book on the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, awarded by the Organization of American Historians)
  • Frederick Douglass Prize, 1999 - Honorable Mention (For the best book on the history of slavery)
"The Traffic in Things and the Rights of Persons: An American Peculiarity." In The New History of Capitalism. Edited by Sven Beckert and Christine Desan, forthcoming.

"Slave Breeding and Free Love: An Antebellum Argument over Slavery, Capitalism, and Personhood." In Capitalism Takes Command. Edited by Michael Zakim and Gary Kornblith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

"Instead of Waiting for the Thirteenth Amendment: The War Power, Slave Marriage, and Inviolate Human Rights." American Historical Review (June 2010).

"When We Were Young." In Wayne F. Miller: Photographs 1942-1958. Edited by Stephen Daiter. Brooklyn: Powerhouse Books, 2008.

"Wages, Sin, and Slavery: Some Thoughts on Free Will and Commodity Relations." Journal of the Early Republic 24 (Summer 2004).

"Dominion and Dependence in the Law of Freedom and Slavery." Law & Social Inquiry (2003)

"Marriage, Property, and Ideals of Class." In Blackwell's Companion to American Women's History. Edited by Nancy Hewitt. Blackwell Press, 2002.

"The Right to Possess All the Faculties that God Has Given: Possessive Individualism, Slave Women, and Abolitionist Thought." In Moral Problems in American Life. Edited by Lewis Perry and Karen Halttunnen. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

"Home Life and the Morality of the Marketplace: Slavery and Freedom,Women and Men." In The Market Revolution in America. Edited by Melvyn Stokes. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996.

"Beggars Can't Be Choosers: Compulsion and Contract in Postbellum America." Journal of American History 78 (March 1992): 1265-93.

"Conjugal Bonds and Wage Labor: Rights of Contract in the Age of Emancipation" Journal of American History 75 (September 1988): 471-500.
 
Matthew Pinsker is Associate Professor of History, Pohanka Chair in American Civil War History (2002).

B.A., Harvard University, 1990; D.Phil., University of Oxford, 1995.

Pinsker teaches courses in U.S. political, legal and diplomatic history. His research focuses on the career of Abraham Lincoln, partisanship in the Civil War era, American constitutionalism, the Underground Railroad and the history of U.S. campaigns and elections.
 
James Brewer Stewart is the Founder of Historians Against Slavery and James Wallace Professor of History Emeritus, Macalester College. He has published a dozen books on the history of the American antislavery movement, has appeared in several of the American Experience’s historical documentaries, is co editor for Louisiana University Press of a book series on “Abolition, Antislavery and the Atlantic World” and has spoken widely on college and university campuses on “Abolishing Slavery in Lincoln’s Time and Ours”
 
Another bio:
Manisha Sinha is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was born in India and received her doctorate from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and The Slave's Cause: Abolition and the Origins of American Democracy (Forthcoming, Yale University Press). She is also co-editor of the two volume African American Mosaic: A Documentary History from the African Slave Trade to the Twenty First Century (Prentice Hall, 2004) and Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race and Power in American History (Columbia University Press, 2007). In 2011, she was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest honor bestowed on faculty at the University of Massachusetts and delivered the Distinguished Faculty Lecture. In 2006, she was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society and in 2003, she was appointed to the Organization of American Historians’ Distinguished Lecture Series.

She is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Philosophical Society, American Council of Learned Societies, the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History and the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African American Research at Harvard University, the Howard Foundation at Brown University, a Rockefeller Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities from the University of North Carolina, and the President's and Whiting fellowships from Columbia University. Her research interests lie in nineteenth century United States history, especially the history of slavery and abolition, the sectional conflict and the coming of the Civil War, political and African American history, and the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She has published numerous articles and lectured widely on these topics. She is the editor of the "Race and the Atlantic World, 1700-1900," series of the University of Georgia Press. She has blogged for the Disunion section of the The New York Times Opinionator, The Huffington Post, and the History News Network.
 
Thanks for the notification. Darn, I wish I had known about this sooner. Seems like it will be a great event featuring some folks who I think can justly be called some of the heavy hitters from the northeastern US.

- Alan
 
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