What This Blog is For/Why I am in this Class

My interest in the African diaspora stems primarily from my interest in the American [read United States] South. Any understanding of the South historically, or presently, must begin and end with a reckoning with slavery and race. Slavery and racism are undoubtedly a national crime/experience, but in the South slavery began first, lasted longest, and shaped the culture most deeply. The post-emancipation reckoning with the meaning of freedom and citizenship in the South cemented the centrality of the African American experience for understanding Southern history.

My particular sub-field, the history of education, must likewise begin with W.E.B. DuBois' observation that "public education for all at public expense was, in the South, a Negro idea." What became of this "Negro idea" in the years between the Civil War and the Progressive Era (say 1920) is my main interest.

I see this course as an opportunity to explore some of the themes that preoccupy my own research in a broader chronological and geographic (and perhaps methodological) focus. When Americans in the 1860 thought about emancipation they thought about two things: Haiti and the British West Indies. At no time was America as insular or exceptional as a glance at the US history section of the library might suggest. I hope to explore aspects of the black experience in the Americas not so much in a comparative perspective, but a transnational one. To examine how ideas, people, and experiences flowed into and shaped one another and what the broader experience of diaspora(s) can tell us about the African American experience in the US South.