Charleston Conference
One hundred years ago the outstanding African American scholar-activist, W. E. B. Du Bois, presented to the American Historical Association a paper entitled “Reconstruction and Its Benefits.” In the paper and in his seminal Black Reconstruction, published a quarter century later, Du Bois not only exposed the racial assumptions underpinning the dominant view of the period following slave emancipation: he insisted that the struggles over slavery and the shape of the freedom that followed were central to the history of America’s working people, calling it “the kernel and meaning of the labor movement in the United States.” Over the past generation, historians have built upon Du Bois’s powerful insight about the connections between race, labor and citizenship in the post-emancipation South, producing some of the most compelling scholarship in the field of U. S. history.
Together with the Program on the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (College of Charleston) and other co-sponsors, the After Slavery Project has organized a conference that will take up these themes in nearly two dozen sessions organized over three days, from March 11th through the 13th, 2010. Panels will include presentations from outstanding scholars in the fields of labor, Southern and African American history; teachers' workshops led by award-winning educators and curriculum experts; sessons on public history and commemoration that will bring together public historians, labor and community activists, and officials from the National Parks Service; and a keynote address by the Pulitzer- and Bancroft prize-winning historian Steven Hahn.
Join us for three days of discussion in historic Charleston–a city whose history is bound inseparably with the institution of slavery, with slave resistance and the monumental struggles over the meaning and scope of emancipation.
Conference Timetable available here. Registration forms are available here; information on accommodations and air and ground transport can be found here. Media and other inquiries should be forwarded via e-mail to
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Organized by the After Slavery Project
Co-sponsored by the Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World (CLAW); the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture (College of Charleston);
the (SC) African American Historical Alliance; The Citadel’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Southern Labor Studies Association
other supporting organizations: Center for the Study of the American South (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill); Institute for Southern Studies (University of South Carolina at Columbia); Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA); Charleston International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1422; The Citadel Oral History Program; W. E. B. Du Bois Institute (Harvard University)
This Conference is sponsored by The Humanities CouncilSC, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities;
inspiring, educating and enriching South Carolinians with programs on literature, history, culture and heritage.
The After Slavery Project is funded by the
(UK) Arts and Humanities Research Council
(UK) Arts and Humanities Research Council
