Georgia Historical Society

Landmarks Visiting Scholars

Alexander X. Byrd is an associate professor of history at Rice University and is the author of Captives & Voyagers: Black Migrants Across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World, a history of free and forced transatlantic black migration in the period of the American Revolution. Dr. Byrd regularly offers courses on The Atlantic World: Origins to the Age of Revolutions, The Origins of Afro-America, Brown v. Board of Education, and Blacks in the Americas. In 2006, Dr. Byrd received the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching. He has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Dr. Byrd will talk about transatlantic black migrations to the Lowcountry in the eighteenth century.

Erskine Clarke is an expert on religion and slavery in the American South. He is Emeritus Professor of American Religious History at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. Dr. Clarke is the author, most recently, of Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic. This book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in history, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in 2006, awarded annually by Columbia University in New York to a work of exceptional merit in American history. This book is a narrative history of four generations of white & black inhabitants on the plantations of prominent Georgia minister Charles Colcock Jones. Covering the years 1805-1869, Dr. Clarke's book explores the vastly different experiences of slave and slaveowner on the plantation, and it will be read by all workshop participants prior to the workshop.

Annette Gordon-Reed is professor of law at New York Law School and professor of history at Rutgers University. She is the author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, which received the Pulitzer Prize in history, the National Book Award for non-fiction, and the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, an annual prize awarded by Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition for the best book written in English on slavery or abolition. She is also the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, which had an acclaimed but stormy reception when it was first published in 1997. Dr. Gordon-Reed will discuss the experience of African-American women in slavery and freedom.

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Jacqueline Jones is Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas and Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History at the University of Texas at Austin. A former MacArthur Fellow (1999-2004) and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she specializes in U.S. southern, African-American, labor, and women's history. She is author of several books, including Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War (a finalist for the 2009 Frederick Douglass Book Prize); Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present for which she received the prestigious Bancroft Prize; and Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865-1873. Dr. Jones has also received the Taft Prize in Labor History, the Spruill Prize in Southern Women's History, the Brown Publication Prize in Black Women's History, plus research grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council. Dr. Jones will help us to understand urban slavery and the ways in which the urban South created a unique environment for the creation of African-American life and culture in the 19th and 20th centuries.