Wednesday April 21, 2010 5:30 — 7:00 p.m.
The Politics of Slaves: Mobility, Messages, and Power in the Antebellum South
Susan O'Donovan, University of Memphis
Most of us have heard about the grapevine telegraph. Many of us talk about it. Some of us sing about it. But few of us have explored the full scope of an often covert system of knowledge creation and conveyance. How did this “telegraph” operate? Who embodied it, when, under what circumstances, and most critical of all, given an escalating debate about the future of slavery in a young nation, to what social and political effect? Susan O’Donovan investigates these and other questions as she attempts to make sense of the tangled relationships between mobility, messages, and an always unstable terrain of power in antebellum America.
All papers are pre-circulated electronically to those who plan to attend the seminar in person. For a copy of the paper, e-mail Heather Radke at scholl@newberry.org,or call (312) 255-3524.
The Newberry Library Seminar in Early American History and Culture is co-sponsored by the History Departments of DePaul University, Loyola University Chicago, Northern Illinois University, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture at the University of Chicago
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