IPPH Defining Fathers Legacy Series: Frederick Douglass on September 14, 2024

 Just when you think the 15 minutes of fame is long over, you get an e-mail that you don't think is supposed to be for you, but it is. You also have a wonderful talk with one of the planners.

On September 14, 2024, the Institute of Politics, Policy, and History will hold the next in its "Defining Fathers Legacy Series" focusing on Frederick Douglass at the Frederick Dogulass National Historic Site starting at 11:30. The panel will include former D.C. Mayor Sharon Pratt (a Democrat) and Michael Steele (a never-Trump former head of the Republican Party) asking quetions of Pulitzer Prize-wining Yale historian David Blight (who has always been a good friend to me) and little ole me. 

Alas, I do beleive that they are sold out, now -- or would be "sold" if the tickets weren't free. 

 

It should be fascinating because of the other panelists and fun for me. Also, the event includes another chance to tour Douglass's house, which is always a treat.

Four Years Later

 So there was a pandemic, then teaching in a pandemic, then the death of another parent, then writing another book through it all, which brings us to now. The new book!

Sally Hemings: Given Her Time from the Lives of American Women series edited by Carol Berkin for Routledge Press. Alas, Routledge seems uninterested in moving product given their pricing schemes. The series intended for professors to assign to their large surveys or for gift shops to sell to tourists at relevant historic sites will never ever ever reach their destinations because Routledge has priced the book so high that I am embarassed to do any promotion myself.  (Buy from their website, linked above, if you must. It's far less expensive there than from any other site.)

For highlights listen to this interview that I did with Gerald Horne for his "Freedom Now" progam on KPFT that aired September 7, 2024, at 11 am Pacific Time.:  https://archive.kpfk.org/mp3/kpfk_240907_110000freedomnow.mp3 

 If you like what you hear and want to know more, send me an e-mail. I'll send you a present.

In any case, I wrote it for my mom, because she told me to write it when I was offered the opportunity and because she always loved Sally Hemings. She, too, was a mother, and her mother, and her mother's mother, form the spine of this story. 

I also wrote this for my students who wanted to know more about her, and I will give my book to my students for free. Mom won't get to read this book, but they will.

 For the longest time, I was a bit embarassed to be ding it because the topic never felt like it was mine in the way the Frederick Douglass and women did. I felt like I was a usurper, treading on someone else's territory. Then, I felt ever more self-conscious as a White woman daring to imagine a Black woman's experience. Now, I feel that I did bring a perspective (and, I hope, respect) to her life. She saw the limits of the nation at its birth, and she is worth knowing. 

Chittenango Landing Canal Boat Museum

After a lovely weekend in New York City talking to teachers about Douglass and women and the Civil War, and then a beautiful wedding of a former student in Washingtonville, I'm back home and preparing for this Thursday's talk.

If you are in Chittenango, birthplace of Wizard of Oz author of L Frank Baum who was also son-in-law of suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage, who lived in my neighborhood, drop on by. My talk will be at the Chittenango Landing Canal Boat Museum on the old Erie Canal at 7:00 pm. A $5.00 donation is suggested for non-members of the museum. The subject will be "Frederick Douglass, Woman's Rights Man" and is part of their Woman Suffrage series. For more information on the talk and the museum, visit their website.

For more information on "Frederick Douglass, Woman's Rights Man: Woman Suffrage Series" click here.

Oh, and contract for Sally Hemings: Given Her Time signed with a deadline of September 2021 (gulp!). Expect to be able to assign it to classes the following year. She may start encroaching on this blog, which would probably require renaming the whole thing. We'll see how that goes.

Summer Touring Schedule (such as it is)

The book tour, such as it is, continues. Now is the season of summer schools and institutes, which are always fantastic no matter how you participate in them.

Last week, the lovely and brilliant Douglas Egerton and I drove down to Lawrenceville Academy in Princeton, New Jersey, to speak to historian Erik Chaput's summer school class on Frederick Douglass. The class is on Frederick Douglass, that is. Doug spoke about black abolition and I used Anna Murray to guide them through methods of research and ways to alert themselves to questions that they should be asking when they confront different types of information in documents. I had a great time, and I hope that they did, too. I forgot that they were high school seniors because they acted and thought like college seniors.

Only the book in the center is mine. 

The rest are only a fraction of Doug's output.

Erik took the picture.

Next up will be Graham Hodges' NEH Seminar for teachers on Abolition and the Underground Railroad at Colgate University, followed by Carol Berkin's on American Women at War in New York City, then on to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to chair a panel on abolition at the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic's annual meeting, followed by the Chittenango Boat Landing at the beginning of August. That last one is open to the public.

Fall will take this show overseas again, this time to Newcastle-upon-Tyne for Newcastle University's INSIGHTS series of lectures (this is last year's program). Newcastle was the home of the Richardsons, who began the campaign to purchase Douglass's freedom and provide the seed money for the North Star. Guess what my talk will be about?

Meanwhile, (among other things like two book proposals, one submitted) I'm writing an essay for an anthology, Frederick Douglass in Context, edited by Michael Roy, who was part of that conference in Paris last year. My essay is about Douglass and family, and I don't want to retread what I have already said nor do I want to tread on what I know of Ezra Greenspan's upcoming work (as if I could ever be as good!). Looking back on something that you've gone over a million times to see something new can be a challenge because you have to step away from your own patterns and ruts of thinking when you sometimes aren't even aware that you have them. I also have a problem figuring out when I'm saying something original because I'm too aware of where I picked up so many ideas and then I've lived with my own configuration of them for so long. Knowing what you have can sometimes be a different thing from stepping back and re-asking, "what do I have?"

At the Grafton Historical Society, Massachusetts

On April 30, 1842, Douglass spoke in Grafton, Massachusetts, outside of Worcester. This past weekend, I had the opportunity to follow in his footsteps. The short 2019 book tour (such as it is) continued by taking me there with a stop at the Grafton Community Barn to participate in “Rising Towards Unity … when not all voices were equal," a series of events presented by the Grafton Historical Society, Grafton Public Library, and the Unitarian Universalist Society of Grafton and Upton.

The venue had a bit of the air of a space in which Douglass or another nineteenth century speaker might have appeared, big, open, wooden floors, but bright and modern, too. I, alas, have not the lung or vocal capacity of those days, and the microphone was on the fritz, so there is a moment of adjustment to move me closer to the audience at the beginning of the video and then request from the back that I speak up from time to time. Everyone was so polite and engaged, despite my tendency to go off-script and over time, and they asked great questions, as well, and the president graciously waited to reopen the building when I left my phone charger behind.

Oh, and get this: Abby Kelley Foster sat in the front row! Not actually her, but Lynne McKenney Lydick, who portrays her, as well as Clara Barton, two local heroes of nearby Worcester. A young woman also showed up in the Bloomer costume that she uses for teaching children at the library.  I usually try to dress in a way to evoke a historical period, so having the audience do the same makes me feel like my people have arrived.

The next event in their series will be "Reading Frederick Douglass Together: The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro," to be held at the Grafton Common on July 5, 2019. If you are around, stop by.



By the way, note that my video editing skills have now improved with the inclusion of a title and conclusion cards and with a thumbnail different from the video. Everyday's a school day, right?

[The bracelet that I flash at the beginning reads "Claire Strong" in honor of my little niece and her struggle with leukemia. Our family likes to send pictures of it when we are at different places. Thus, it did not end up on the cutting room floor.]

Friends of Mount Hope Cemetery Annual Meeting Talk

Frederick Douglass, Anna Douglass, Helen Douglass, little Annie Douglass, Rosetta Douglass Sprague, Nathan Sprague, Louisa Sprague, Alice Sprague, Annie Sprague, Amy and Isaac Post along with their family, the Porters, Susan B. Anthony, and so many more lie buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York. 

The Friends of Mount Hope care for the still-functioning cemetery and its records, as well as offer tours of the most significant elements of the site, including its geographic features, history as a burial place, and as the final resting place of so many important people in the history of the city and the nation. They, indeed, helped me with my research for the final chapter of my book; and when you visit the Douglass gravesite, remember that its condition results from their efforts. They literally care for Frederick Douglass.

Therefore, when Pat Corcoran invited me to speak at their annual meeting last week, I was more than honored. I made myself more anxious by choosing to speak about my research into the composition of the gravesite. After all, they probably know more about it than I do. Still, they proved to be a lovely audience (who bought many books), and I'm grateful for the work that they do. As I say in the introduction to my talk, everyone whose bones rest in that place were loved by someone, and they continue that care while providing a peaceful, green place of contemplation.

Seward Stories Talk: From Documentary Editing to Biography

Last Wednesday, at the suggestion of Pat Corcoran, Thomas Slaughter invited me to be the keynote speaker at the Seward Stories event at the University of Rochester. Slaughter edits and manages the Seward Family Digital Project, which lives in the Rush Rhees library there, and Seward Stories allows researchers working on the project to present interesting aspects of the project's findings and progress.

The whole endeavor is really exactly what an editing project like this should be. It makes archival material accessible to the public, annotates it for context that sometimes even scholars do not know nor understand, provides professional and scholarly experience for both undergraduate and graduate students, and facilitates collaboration within and across institutions and interest groups. This is the sort of thing of which I could only fantasize when I was at the Douglass Papers, before the technology was even available.

I met with students who are working on impressive dissertations, with the history department chair, with the library dean, with the digital lab technicians, and with the archivists in special collections. Everyone was wonderful, but the last two left me with gifts.

The digital lab techs have created 3-D printing software for copies of the Douglass bust owned by the University of Rochester, and when I gushed about making plans to get to my local library to have them make one for me on the 3-D printer their, one of the techs said, "hey, here, have this one." So, swag!

"Claire Strong" is for my 5-year-old niece, 

who is recovering from leukemia.

Then, the special collections librarians did one better. They brought out the volume of sheet music that contains "Farewell Song to Frederick Douglass," composed by Julia Griffiths and her brother T. Powis, the one performed at the big Douglass gala in Rochester last December. They let me touch it! Without gloves! And had a great acquisitions story! And share my horror at auction houses that don't want to know provenance prior to their own purchase!

After the tours and lunch, we went to the auditorium in the library for presentations, which included reports on the work with seniors who collaborate with the students in transcribing letters, two charming discussions of unusual names in the project and the regular appearance of pets in the correspondence, and a rumination of the importance of this intimate view of the Seward family.

My own paper, conceived separately from these presentations, seemed to touch on some of the same issues. As you can see if you watch or listen to the video, I decided to explain the ways that my book evolved from my annotation of the Douglass correspondence. The paper fit right in methodologically and theoretically.

We all go so deeply into the details of our subjects' lives in annotation, but we are looking primarily at the alleged "private" side, finding that such distinctions are not accurate, even if they are the language of our subjects and thus the ways that they tried to explain the bargains and boundaries of their own lives.

"The Book I Did Not Write: Other Approaches," Paper in Paris, 12 October 2018

Last Friday, 12 October 2018, I delivered one of the three keynote addresses at the Frederick Douglass Across and Against Times, Places, and Disciplines conference held in Paris (yes, THAT Paris -- the one in Europe, not the one in Texas). The whole event was a spectacular gathering of scholars working in philosophy, political science, literature, history, and all sorts of humanities from all types of schools and engaging with Douglass's world with about as many different sensibilities and sympathies as there were people in attendance. Helene Quanquin, one of the organizers, said that the conference was filled to capacity, and certainly all of the sessions that I attended had very few empty seats. (Like in our classrooms, those empty seats tended to be front and center -- indeed, people would rather sit on the floor than sit in the front row!)

I'm posting the video of my keynote here, but one of the papers that I heard and that I want to highlight is Rhae Lynn Barnes's digital history project, "Frederick Douglass in the City of Lights: Walking Tour," which is part of a large project, U.S. History Scene. She did this project with undergraduate students of all levels, and used Douglass's experience, among others, as a means of engaging with issues of race and class in Paris today. It's quite spectacular and similar to some of the work Amy Cools has been doing in her posts on her blog, Ordinary Philosophy. Next time I'm in Paris, this will be on my itinerary!

Now, on to my paper, "The Book I Did Not Write: Other Approaches to Women in the World of Frederick Douglass."

Mystic, Connecticut

I'm off to Mystic, Connecticut, today for the roundtable on Mystic history at Groton Public Library tomorrow.

Douglass actually spoke in the area a few times, mostly in 1868. That makes complete sense, 1868 being an election year and Connecticut tending toward Republican. On December 19, 1867, he spoke in New London, the city that first harbored -- or would that be incarcerated? -- the Africans on the Amistad. The old Customs House even has a marker to the incident. Steven Spielberg filmed many of the outdoor, dock scenes of Amistad at Mystic Seaport; and if you want to see stars in the eyes of shipbuilders, ask the guys down at the Seaport shipyard about building the replica. The pure joy that would come over their faces!

To give you an idea of how close the two places are, when I worked at Mystic Seaport, I lived in New London and the commute was maybe 30 whole minutes from my front door to my desk, with stop lights and a bad attitude.

Douglass did not go home for Christmas that year, because he traipsed through parts of Massachusetts then back to Mystic on January 4, 1868. He went up the Connecticut River to Suffield, Connecticut, then over to Bridgeton, New Jersey, and Newburyport, Massachusetts, (birthplace of William Lloyd Garrison) after that. Such a wide range, all on rivers and near coasts, all within a week, suggest he travelled by boat. Then -- boom! -- Bath, New York, in the Finger Lakes seven days later and westward to the Old Northwest. A shift to the train.

He turned back to New England the following autumn, speaking to the YMCA at Armory Hall in Westerly, R.I., on November 30, which is really just right next door to Mystic, and then back to New London the next day and just north to Norwich on December 2. Norwich, he may or may not have known, was the birthplace of David Ruggles, his savior in New York City during his first 24 hours of freedom.

(I want to say that I've been to the Westerly Armory Hall, I think to watch that Billy Goat Boyfriend practice with his band in the basement, so I tried to block it all out.)

Douglass did not go back to that part of Connecticut until December 30, 1875, not an election year, but on the eve of a very important one, the one that ultimately ended Reconstruction in the South. I don't have much evidence that he travelled that way before the Civil War, but then the Stonington line was the last stretch of the coastal railroad line built, completed in 1858. Most of his attention in southern New England stayed around Providence and New Bedford before he shifted to New York. He was very strategic in the use of his powers.

Going where Douglass went, however, is always quite nice. I wonder what he saw and where he stayed, what he thought of a seaside town, himself having spend so much time among shipbuilders in his youth. This sort of attachment to a subject is one of the reasons I am so at loose ends now that this book is done, leaving me too jangled to settle into the next and feeling a bit like I have a post-partum depression (not that I know what that actually is like).

One last story about Douglass and Mystic: Mystic Seaport was the first place where I saw caulking, the job Frederick Bailey trained to do in Baltimore. Loud, smelling of pine pitch and hemp rope (no, not hemp like that!) and watery air, the moment seemed a bit like time-travel, seeing this old skill in practice with period tools on a ship old enough that Douglass himself could have worked on the original boards, and thinking of him doing the same.

ETA: Read more here, including a link to tomorrow's podcast of the event.

Douglass at the 2018 State Fair

Beginning next Wednesday, August 22, 2018, the Gerrit Smith Estate National Historic Landmark, John Brown Lives, the National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum, and the Underground Railroad Consortium of New York State will host a series of events at the New York State Fair here in Syracuse, the "Convention City" of the nineteenth century.

One set of programs commemorates the Frederick Douglass Bicentennial:

Wed., Aug. 22, 3:00 p.m.:  1850 Fugitive Slave Convention: Douglass and Smith, Hugh C. Humphreys.

Sat., Aug. 25, 2:00 pm: Drama: A Time in the Life of Frederick Douglass, Shields Green, and a Woman Called Moses, Akwaaba Players.

Sun., Aug. 26, 2:00 pm: Equality Day: Women in the World of Frederick Douglass, Leigh Fought (me!) -- Cancelled due to out-of-town family emergency.

Mon., Aug. 27, 2:00 pm: The Innocence of Experience: Fanny Seward in Her Own Words, Maria Coleman

Tues., Aug. 28, 2:00 pm: Conserving Frederick Douglass, Tom Hunter

Wed., Aug. 29, 2:00 pm: 1850 Cazenovia Fugitive Slave Convention: Douglass & Smith, Hugh C. Humphreys

Thurs., Aug. 30, 2:00 pm: Frederick Douglass in Chautauqua County: Researching the Underground Railroad in NYS, Karen Livsey

Fri., Aug. 31, 2:00 pm: Frederick Douglass and Other Friends of Timbuctoo, Martha Swan

Sat., Sept. 1, 2:00 pm: Frederick Douglass, Quakers, and Reform in Upstate New York, Judith Wellman

Sun., Sept. 2, 2:00 pm: Frederick Douglass and Quakers, and the 1816 Farmington Quaker Meetinghouse, Reginald Neale

Mon., Sept 3, 2:00 pm: Frederick Douglass, Quakers, and Reform in Upstate New York, Judith Wellman

All events will be held in the Empire Theater in the Arts & Home Center, circled in blue below.:

The Underground Railroad Consortium program has scheduled these events:

I confess that I haven't been to a State Fair since the 1986 Texas State Fair, although I've been to smaller county fairs once or twice since then. (I went to one with a boyfriend of the time who seemed a bit too fascinated with the billy goats, which should have been my first clue that something wasn't right about him, like attracting like and all. He's someone else's problem now, thank heavens!) I'm kind of excited to see what it is all about, what with my memories of quilts and Cinderella's carriage-sized pumpkins and such. I hope to see butter-making, or sculptures, anyway. 

I digress. 

The State Fair hails the beginning of the semester, which means anything not involving the classroom falls by the wayside from lack of time and lack of energy. My energy has been sorely taxed of late already, too. Still, the Paris conference beckons in early October, as well as a pass through London that includes Othello. With luck, I shall have the data to post on those from there. Otherwise, the next post may not appear for yet another year. 

Frederick Douglass at 200 at Linfield College, Oregon, 27 April 2018

This past spring has been quite busy in the Frederick Douglass world, and for Women in the World of Frederick Douglass. Much gratitude to everyone who has read the book, to everyone who has purchased the book, and to everyone who has expressed in any way their appreciation of it by reading it, buying it, coming to a talk, talking to me about Douglass and the women in his life, inviting me to talk about it, and awarding the book a prize.

Here is a video of a talk that I gave at the "Frederick Douglass at 200" symposium at Linfield College in McMinville, Oregon, in April.:



The full playlist of speakers can be found here. They include Diana Schaub, David Blight (who gives us an outline of his upcoming and eagerly anticipated biography of Douglass, out in October), Melvin Rogers, and Ibram Kendi. They are all fantastic, and it was an honor to share the program with them.

LA Times Festival of Books: Women Behind the Power

A bit behind here, what with grading and catching upon being behind and so forth. Here is the C-Span video of the LA Times Festival of Books: Women Behind the Power from two weeks ago. It was such a lovely experience, with a fantastic audience and a panel of amazing writers. Blanche Wiesen Cook generously helped me to save myself when I blanked on an answer to a question and then figured out what to say. Also, what can you say about an event in which people flocked to tents to buy books and hear authors speak except that there is hope for the world!

My view of the proceedings.:

LA Times Festival of Books, April 22-23, 2017

Well this is a whole new level: I've been asked to be on the panel "Biography: The Women Behind the Power" at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in April. The panel includes Blanche Wiesen Cook of Eleanor Roosevelt biography fame, Lisa Napoli, and Susan Quinn.

I actually met Cook ages ago in 2000, in Houston. She did a book reading at the Brazos Bookstore (I think it was), then joined the Women's Group for dinner at a place in West U. where we all gushed over her. I have a picture somewhere. That was the summer before my internship at the Margaret Sanger Papers at NYU.

This is all so amazing! I've never been to Los Angeles! They want authors to meet in a greenroom before their sessions. They asked if we wanted to do media, as in radio and t.v. They wanted a dang headshot! I joke that I shall return all tan, wearing big sun glasses, and waxed from my eyebrows to my toes.  How much will this count on my 15 minutes of fame?

In any case, my panel is on Saturday, April 22, 2017, at 10:30 am.