Ceremony to honor 2023 Dan David Prize Laureates.

Sharing material derived from my book project “Women of the Trade.”

The Atlantic History Workshop at NYU, established in 1997, is a forum for the exchange of ideas among scholars of the humanities and social sciences with interests in the history of Atlantic currents and connections. Organized as a space for collaborative study, the workshop sponsors regular sessions during the academic year to discuss works in progress by both junior and senior researchers. Papers are circulated in advance, and all sessions are open to both members of the Atlantic world history program of the NYU History Department and the wider scholarly community.

Sharing my work “She had a Womb Subjected to Bondage.”

This will be a virtual event held on Zoom. More details to follow.

Presenting a paper derived from my new book project Women of the Trade.

The Faculty Seminar series was created by IIS co-directors Susan Hyde and Daniel Sargent to promote engagement and forge connections of UC Berkeley faculty across the academic disciplines. Over monthly lunchtime presentations, faculty participants get the opportunity to learn from each other across the silos of discipline and field, and engage in informative conversations that spark connections and expand a shared understanding of various research agendas. As such, the IIS Seminar forum is meant to help to knit together international studies as an interdisciplinary domain at UC Berkeley. 

Workshopping my paper “She had…a Womb Subjected to Bondage”: Reconsidering the Origins of British Colonial Descent Law. 

This is virtual Zoom event. The workshop format is a pre-circulated paper with a moderated discussion. Please contact Kaelyn Apple at kaelyn.apple@yale.edu to be added to the working group email list. Pre-circulated papers and the Zoom login are only distributed to the group email list.

Delivering presentation entitled “Mistress of the Market: White Women and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Slave Trade.” This is a virtual event. Register to attend here: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/9316541895270/WN_bAajKid_SMGwRtOwoHHRvQ

Delivering a keynote presentation entitled “‘Wet Nurse For Sale or Hire:’ White Women, Wet Nursing, and Enslaved Mothers’ Invisible Labor in the American Slave Market.” This is a virtual event.

Workshop at which I will discuss my new work entitled “She had…a Womb Subjected to Bondage”: Reconsidering the Origins of British Colonial Descent Law.

Plenary for the Coordinating Council for Women in History at the virtual meeting of the American Historical Association. February 21, 2022 at 5:00PM EST. This event will be on Zoom. Sessions will be recorded. Recordings will be available on the AHA meeting platform for several months and available for viewing by anyone registered for the AHA meeting.

DESCRIPTION

In December of 1662, Virginia’s legislators passed an act that made the free or enslaved status of a child born in the colony contingent upon the free or enslaved status of their mother. Such a choice was and remains remarkable to scholars because it stood in direct contrast with the paternal descent laws that prevailed in England. In trying to explain Virginia’s decision to implement a maternal rather than paternal descent law, legal historians and slavery scholars have offered several theories. They contend that legislators either codified local custom or that they drew heavily upon Roman slave law, canon law, British laws related to bastardy and animal husbandry, the law of nations, or laws governing other systems of slavery. This paper proposes another possibility.

Rather than approach the questionable origins of British colonial descent laws from a Eurocentric perspective, this paper examines the role that West African customs and laws may have played in shaping them. I take the system of laws and customs that prevailed on the West Coast of Africa during the Atlantic slave trade as my point of departure, and in so doing, I approach the issue of British slave descent laws from an African-Atlantic vantage point.  Using an array of sources, I show what the English knew about West African descent laws and customs, chart how this information circulated among and between individuals across three continents, and ultimately, assess the possible impact of this knowledge on British colonial lawmaking and gendered laws pertaining to slave descent.

Roundtable about Women, Family, and Reproduction

Friday November 5, 2021 3:30-5:00 PM EST/12:30-3:00 PM PST

Presiding

Daina Ramey Berry, University of Texas, Austin

Panelists

Stephanie Jones-Rogers, University of California, Berkeley

Cassia Roth, University of Georgia

Brenda Stevenson, University of California, Los Angeles

Register for this virtual roundtable here: https://hopin.com/events/87th-annual-southern-historical-association-meeting/registration

The Transatlantic Slavery Symposium (August 9-13, 2021) is a joint venture between Benjamin Franklin House in London, the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, and the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Our aim is to bring together scholars from both sides of the Atlantic to address the lasting impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade through panel discussions on themes ranging from its historical foundations and development in the Revolutionary Atlantic world to current best practices in the museums and heritage sector. We hope that by addressing this complex topic from a historical and contemporary perspective, we can spark further discussions on how to bring stories of enslaved people to the forefront of public history internationally.

This event is free and open to the public.

Register here: https://tickets.monticello.org/webstore/shop/viewItems.aspx?cg=STF&c=APW&_ga=2.101567746.240401797.1626723486-159750349.1626723486

Conference Schedule: https://www.monticello.org/research-education/for-scholars/conferences-and-symposia/transatlantic-slavery-symposium/conference-schedule/

More information on the Capitalism and Slavery session: https://www.monticello.org/research-education/for-scholars/conferences-and-symposia/transatlantic-slavery-symposium/conference-schedule/capitalism-and-slavery/

Talking with Professor Matthew Gabriele and Varsha Venkatasubramanian about They were Her Property on Drinking with Historians, a bi-weekly (virtual) happy hour with scholars who study the past. All are welcome to have a drink and maybe learn a thing or two. There will be a Q & A following the conversation.

This event is free and open to the public. Join the conversation here: https://virginiatech.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_YxoNRcNPRuKeaLmQcATsSw

Podcast originally posted on 6/18/2021: Join Mandy and Katy, “two longtime white lady friends,” as they reckon with the history of white women with humor and rage...​and figure out what it means for their obligations today. We’ll be talking about They Were Her Property. Access the podcast here: https://www.ourdirtylaundrypodcast.com/listen--read/stephanie-e-jones-rogers

This roundtable examines the many facets of sexuality within slave communities in the United States, the Caribbean, and South America. The four panelists explore consensual sexual intimacy and expression within slave communities, as well as sexual relationships across lines of race, status, and power. They also explore sexuality as a tool of control, exploitation, and repression and as an expression of autonomy, resistance, and defiance.

Chair: Daina Ramey Berry, University of Texas at Austin
Panel: Jim Downs, Gettysburg College; Thomas A. Foster, Howard University; Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, University of California, Berkeley; and Bianca Premo, Florida International University

This virtual event is free and open to the public.

It will also have live captioning through Otter.ai.

To register, please go to the following link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_wUKgtVbgSYWs6u9nnm8LAg

Date: May 27, 2021

Time: 2:00PM EST/11:00AM PST

One of E Pluribus Unum’s Conversations for an Equitable South. The series continues to bring together some of our country’s great thinkers, activists, advocates, and leaders on the issues of race and equity in the American South. These conversations provide a space to discuss the lasting impact racism has had on people and institutions and, as a result, seek to inspire action with the intention of creating racial equity within our communities.

A key theme to be explored throughout this series is the role that white women play in perpetuating white supremacy and structural racism and the opportunities that exist for this demographic group to participate authentically in change.  Themes to be explored include: the role that white women have played in hate movements throughout history, the barriers that prevent white women from engaging in a deep and sustained way in racial justice, opportunities and challenges for women in leadership, motherhood and social justice work, and how to move towards wholeness with an intersectional approach.

Panel Description:

When we think of the leaders of white supremacist movements, we often picture white men.  But what about the role of white women, both historically and today? How do we talk about the role white women have played throughout the period of American slavery, the Jim Crow era, and in today’s white nationalist movements?  How does the flawed telling of our history and the role white women have played in it impact our expectations of white women today?  What would our country look like if white women deployed their social status, spending power, political influence and collective energy to actively become a part of the solution to dismantle white supremacy?

Featuring authors Stephanie Jones-Rogers, Elizabeth Gillespie McRae (Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy), and Seyward Darby (Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism), this conversation will take a look at our history and challenge our understandings of the power of white women then and now.

This event is free and open to the public. For more information about this conversation go to: https://www.unumfund.org/complicity-of-white-women-in-the-south/

To RVSP go to: https://secure.everyaction.com/_aXjiD1lc02U8tosn4MFEw2?emci=2ebf5334-129e-eb11-85aa-0050f237abef&emdi=ea000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000001&ceid=.

Time: 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM ET / 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM CT / 1:30-2:30 PM PT

Please register here for Zoom link.

Please join the Lapidus Center for a conversation between the 2020 Harriet Tubman Prize winner Dr. Stephanie Jones-Rogers, Associate Professor of History at the University of California-Berkeley, and Dr. Thavolia Glymph, Professor of History and Law at Duke University.

Drs. Jones-Rogers and Glymph will discuss Jones-Rogers' They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, a regional study that draws upon formerly enslaved people's testimony to dramatically reshape current understandings of white women's economic relationships to slavery as well as Jones-Rogers' works in progress on gender, race, and slavery. They Were Her Property foregrounds the testimony of enslaved and formerly enslaved people and puts their reflections into conversation with other narrative sources, legal documents, and financial records in order to show how white women's pecuniary investments in the institution shaped their gender identities and to situate them at the center of 19th century America's most significant and devastating system of economic exchange.

Register Here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/lapidus-center-presents-they-were-her-property-registration-146352988729?aff=schomburgsocialmedia

ASL interpretation and real-time (CART) captioning available upon request. Please submit your request at least two weeks in advance by emailing accessibility@nypl.org.

GET THE BOOK |
Readers everywhere who wish to pre-order the book can do so online at The Schomburg Shop.

ABOUT THE INTERLOCUTOR |
Dr. Thavolia Glymph is a professor of history and law at Duke University. Her work focuses on slavery, emancipation, plantation societies and economies, Reconstruction, and black political thought in the nineteenth-century U.S. South. She is the author of Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge University Press, 2008) which received the Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History and was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize, and The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (Littlefield History of the Civil War Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), a finalist for the 2021 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. She is a co-editor of two volumes of the award-winning documentary series Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 (Series 1, Volume 1 and Series 1, Volume 3).

This program will be streamed on Zoom and simulcast to Youtube. You must register with your email address in order to receive the link to participate. Please check your email shortly before the discussion to receive the link. Captions for this event will be provided.

PRESS | Please send all press inquiries (photo, video, interviews, audio-recording, etc) at least 24-hours before the day of the program to Amy Geduldig at amygeduldig@nypl.org.

Virtual Workshop and Discussion of my new research project “‘She had…a Womb Subjected to Bondage’: The Afro-Atlantic Origins of British Colonial Descent Law.”

All sessions will be held via Zoom. 

Virtual talk entitled “Mistresses of the Market: White Women and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Slave Trade." which is based on my book They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. Free and open to the public. Registration required. Register by going to the following link: https://tickets.huntington.org/events/c9080279-e16c-180c-5805-e76c86ce73c0

This talk is part of the University of Georgia’s Gender, Race, and Slavery in the Atlantic World Series. It is being presented by the History and Gender Workshop and is funded by a Faculty Research Seminar Grant from the University of Georgia’s Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.

This talk will occur remotely via Zoom. Register to attend here: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMrduqqpjssHtQGlDcyOjfteCFfJpdkppOp

Virtual Workshop and Discussion of my new research project “‘She had…a Womb Subjected to Bondage’: The Afro-Atlantic Origins of British Colonial Descent Law.”

All sessions will be held from 12:00 to 1:30 pm via Zoom. 

You may subscribe to our listserv by following this link. 

If you have any questions, please email the coordinators (ejhines@uchicago.edu or booneayala@uchicago.edu).