The Library Company of Philadelphia will host a one-day conference on Saturday, June 16th, 2012 on “Making Freedom in the Atlantic World.” This conference will explore the process and impact of emancipation across the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Our conference will serve as recognition of Juneteenth, one of the oldest known celebrations commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States. On June 19th, 1865, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. This news came more than two years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was issued, and the date now often serves as a symbolic day of freedom.

8:00 - 9:00 Registration and continental breakfast
9:00 - 11:00 Panel 1: “Freedom Across the Centuries”

Laura Rosanne Adderly, Associate Professor of History, Tulane University
“Transnational Emancipation: Contesting Black Freedom on the U.S.- Caribbean Border, 1820-1865”

Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Assistant Professor, Northwestern University “Picturing Freedom: Black Visuality in the Transatlantic Home”

Edna Greene Medford, Professor of History, Howard University
“African Americans and the Meaning of the Civil War”

Gary Nash, Professor Emeritus of History, UCLA
“Why is the Quaker Antislavery Movement Ignored by History
Textbooks?”

Break 11:00-11:30

11:30-1:00 Roundtable Discussion: “Preserving Freedom: Collecting Afrrican Americana”

Moderator: Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Director of the Program in African American History and Associate Professor of History, University of Delaware

Phil Lapsansky, Curator of African American History, The Library Company of Philadelphia
Diane Turner, Curator, The Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University
Prithi Kanakamedala, Public Historian, Brooklyn Historical Society
Oliver St. Clair Franklin, Franklin Investment Group, Private Collector

1:00-2:30 Lunch

2:30-5:00 “Perspectives on a New Field: 21st-Century Slavery in the U.S.”
Sponsored by Historians Against Slavery

Keynote address: James Brewer Stewart, the James Wallace Professor of History Emeritus, Macalester College

“Defeated by the Past? Historians, Activists, and the Challenge of Slavery in the 21st Century”

Comment: David Waldstreicher, Professor of History, Temple University

Workshop to follow keynote address:
“Slavery? I Thought the Civil War Took Care of That: Teaching Modern Slavery in the United States”

Workshop leaders:
John Donoghue, Assistant Professor at Loyola University of Chicago Melvin Garrison, Content Specialist Secondary History & African American History at School District of Philadelphia and Cliveden  Allison Mileo Gorsuch, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Yale University Randall Miller, the William Dirk Warren `50 Sesquicentennial Chair & Professor of History, Saint Joseph’s University Wes Skidmore, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Rice University

Evening Session: Extending Inquiry into Emancipation: The SHEAR/Mellon Seminar as an On-line Learning Community ( invitation only)

The Library Company gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Albert M. Greenfield Foundation, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the Pennsylvania Humanities Council, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.