Applications should be mailed to the address below.

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is pleased to offer an unusual opportunity open to faculty members in American history and related fields at small colleges and universities. This week-long seminar will explore the latest issues in slavery studies.

The goal of this seminar is to offer history faculty members an opportunity to study with and to exchange ideas with one of the most renowned scholars of slavery in the world, David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor Emeritus at Yale and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, the National Book Award for History and Biography, the Bancroft Prize, and numerous others, Professor Davis has just published In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery (Yale University Press).

Professor Davis's seminar will include lectures and discussion groups, a guest lecture on slavery in the Caribbean by Professor Orlando Patterson (John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University), and visits to scholarly archives at the New York Historical Society and the Gilder Lehrman Collection, on deposit at the Morgan Library in New York City. Participants will also have a chance to visit "history high schools" in New York, special high schools where American history is part of the curriculum each day for four years.

The seminar will examine the major scholarly works and turning points in the debates over slavery from the time of Ulrich B. Phillips to Eric Williams, Kenneth Stampp, Stanley Elkins, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Eugene Genovese, David Brion Davis, Robin Blackburn, and on to Ira Berlin and David Eltis. Professor Davis will prepare a reader for seminar participants consisting of brief selections from some of these classic books on slavery.

For the first six decades of the 20th century, racial slavery was regarded as a footnote in American history, a minor branch of the "history of the South." This was largely the result of the failure of Reconstruction following the Civil War, as well as the fact that Jim Crow segregation and Southern white supremacy became the terrible price the nation paid for sectional reunion and reconciliation.

The last forty-odd years have changed all that. From the time of the first stirrings of the Civil Rights Movement, historians and economists have written thousands of books and articles that reexamine and illuminate the absolutely central place of the Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery in the history of the entire New World. They have also rediscovered the radical, biracial, and transatlantic character of antislavery movements. Even the public at large has evidenced a remarkable upsurge of interest in these subjects, especially in the 1970s and from the early 1990s to the present.

Yet most college graduates and even many faculty members in the humanities and social sciences are unfamiliar with the debates over slavery that have raged among specialists, to say nothing of spectacular new discoveries concerning the size and destinations of the slave trade, slave culture and resistance, changes in Western culture that made antislavery a possibility, and the differences between slaveholding regimes in New England, the Chesapeake, Carolina, Barbados, Jamaica, and Brazil.

The Slavery Debates: Problems in Slavery Studies Today
June 2-7, 2002 Columbia University
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