Conversation with MAAH Stone Book Award Winner Thulani Davis — The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom
When:
Friday, Oct 20, 2023 3:00p -
4:30p
Friday, Oct 20, 2023 3:00p -
4:30p
Where:
Boston Public Library: Rabb Lecture Hall
700 Boylston Street
Boston, MA 02116
Admission:
FREE
Hosted by:
Categories:
History, Lectures & Conferences, Social Good, Virtual
Event website:
https://bpl.bibliocommons.com/events/6511abf32d0219cf8b5da488
Museum of African American History's (MAAH) 2023 Stone Book Award Winner Thulani Davis will converse with Boston Public Library President David Leonard about her award-winning book that provides a rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South.
This program is happening in-person in the Rabb Lecture Hall of the Central Library in Copley Square and online over Zoom webinar. Please visit the "Registration Required" box on the Event website to register for in-person attendance. To attend online, please register here.
For in-person audiences, at approximately 7:00 PM in the Connector Space outside of Rabb Hall, there will be an author signing facilitated by Frugal Bookstore. Online attendees may order copies of the book from their website.
About the book
Drawing on the practices of community they developed while enslaved, freedpeople built new settlements and created a network of circuits through which they imagined, enacted, and defended freedom. These circuits linked rural and urban organizations, labor struggles, and political culture with news, strategies, education, and mutual aid.
In The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom, Davis shows the geography of ideas of freedom—circulating on shipping routes, via army maneuvers, and with itinerant activists—that became the basis for the first mass Black political movement for equal citizenship in the United States. In this work, she reconfigures understandings of the evolution of southern Black political agendas while outlining the origins of the enduring Black freedom struggle from the Jim Crow era to the present.
Read more at Duke University Press.
About the author
Thulani Davis is a professor and a Nellie Y. McKay Fellow in the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of My Confederate Kinfolk: A Twenty-first Century Freedwoman Discovers Her Roots. A poet and longtime writer for theater, film, and journalism, Davis has been a recipient of a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Writers Award, a PEW Foundation National Theatre Artist Residency, and a Charles H. Revson Fellowship on the Future of New York City.
About the award
The Museum of African American History (MAAH) Stone Book Award is an annual prize that encourages scholarship and writing within the field of African American history and culture by awarding a $50,000 winning prize and two $10,000 finalist prizes for exceptional adult non-fiction books written in a literary style.
Accessibility Notice: We strive to make our events accessible. To request a disability accommodation and/or language services, please contact the Adult Programs Department at [email protected] or 617-859-2129 by October 6. Please allow at least two weeks to arrange for accommodations.
