Mixed Race Studies

Notorious in the Neighborhood with Joshua Rothman, Ph.D.

Research at the National Archives and Beyond
BlogTalk Radio
Thursday, 2013-08-22, 21:00 EDT, (Friday, 2013-08-23, 01:00Z)

Bernice Bennett, Host

Joshua D. Rothman, Professor of History and African American Studies
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa

Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861

Laws and cultural norms militated against interracial sex in  Virginia before the Civil War,. Nonetheless, it was ubiquitous in urban, town, and plantation communities throughout the state. In Notorious in the Neighborhood, Joshua Rothman examines the full spectrum of interracial sexual relationships under slavery-from Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the intertwined interracial families of Monticello and Charlottesville to commercial sex in Richmond, the routinized sexual exploitation of enslaved women, and adultery across the color line.

White Virginians allowed for an astonishing degree of flexibility and fluidity within a seemingly rigid system of race and interracial relations, Rothman argues, and the relationship between law and custom regarding racial intermixture was always shifting. As a consequence, even as whites never questioned their own racial supremacy, the meaning and significance of racial boundaries, racial hierarchy, and ultimately of race itself always stood on unstable ground—a reality that whites understood and about which they demonstrated increasing anxiety as the sectional crisis intensified.

Joshua Rothman is Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Alabama, where he is also Director of the Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South.

For more information, click here.

Mixed Race Studies with Steven Riley [on Research at the National Archives & Beyond]

Research at the National Archives & Beyond
Blog Talk Radio
Thursday, 2013-07-25, 21:00 EDT, (18:00 PDT), (2013-07-26, 01:00Z, 02:00 BST)

Natonne Kemp, Host

Steven Riley is the creator of MixedRaceStudies.org which is a non-commercial website that provides a gateway to contemporary interdisciplinary English language scholarship about the relevant issues surrounding the topic of multiracialism. At present, the site contains +6,000 posts which consists of links to +3,300 articles; +1,000 books; nearly 600 dissertation, papers and reports; nearly 300 multimedia items; +300 excerpts and quotes, +100 course offerings; etc.

Currently, MixedRaceStudies.org receives over 1,800 visitors/day, over 37,000 unique visitors/month, and nearly ½ million page views/month. The site has been called the “most comprehensive and objective clearinghouse for scholarly publications related to critical mixed-race theory” by a leading scholar in the field.

Steve has been an Information Technology professional for 25 years in the D.C. area and is currently Director of Database Development and Design at a trade association in Washington D.C. His areas of expertise are application programming, database and website development.

When he is not developing software applications, he spends his time at home in Silver Spring, Maryland with his artist wife Julia, working on his photography and reading books on history and sociology.

For more information, click here.

Slaves In The Family with Edward Ball

Research at the National Archives and Beyond
BlogTalk Radio
Thursday, 2013-05-16, 21:00-22:00 EDT, (Friday, 2013-05-17, 01:00-02:00Z)

Bernice Bennett, Host

Edward Ball, Lecturer in English
Yale University

If you knew that you were a descendant of a slave- owner, would you tell anyone?

If you had an opportunity to apologize to descendants of those enslaved by your family, would you?

Edward Ball is a writer of narrative nonfiction and the author of five books, including The Inventor and the Tycoon (Doubleday, 2013), about the birth of moving pictures. The book tells the story of Edward Muybridge, the pioneering 19-century photographer (and admitted murderer), and Leland Stanford, the Western railroad baron, whose partnership, in California during the 1870s, gave rise to the visual media.

Edward Ball’s first book, Slaves in the Family (1998), told the story of his family’s history as slave-owners in South Carolina, and of the families they once enslaved. Slaves in the Family won the National Book Award for nonfiction, was a New York Times bestseller, was translated into five languages, and was featured on Oprah.

Edward Ball was born in Savannah, raised in Louisiana and South Carolina, and graduated from Brown University in 1982. He worked for ten years as freelance journalist in New York, writing about art and film, and becoming a columnist for The Village Voice.

His other books, all nonfiction, include The Sweet Hell Inside (2001), the story of an African-American family that rose from the ashes of the Civil War to build lives in music and in art during the Jazz Age; Peninsula of Lies (2004), the story of English writer Gordon Hall, who underwent one of the first sex reassignments—in the South during the 1960s—creating an outrage; and The Genetic Strand, about the process of using DNA to investigate family history.

Edward Ball lives in Connecticut and teaches at Yale University.

Family and Community History of the Winton Triangle

Research at the National Archives & Beyond
BlogTalk Radio
2013-04-22, 21:00-22:00 EDT (2013-04-23, 01:00-02:00Z)

Bernice Bennett, Host

Marvin T. Jones, Executive Director
Chowan Discovery Group

From Family History to Community History—the Chowan Discovery Group Story with Marvin T. Jones, Executive Director of the Chowan Discovery Group (CDG).

The mission of the Chowan Discovery Group  is to research, document, preserve and present the 400+ year-old history of the landowning tri-racial people of color of the Winton Triangle, an area centered in Hertford County, North Carolina.

Founded in 2007, the Chowan Discovery Group (http://www.chowandiscovery.org/)  co-produced in 2009 its first major presentation, a stage production, scripted by Jones, called The Winton Triangle.  The book, Carolina Genesis: Beyond the Color Line, features Jones’ summary of the Triangle’s history.

In addition to writing articles, Jones has made numerous presentations about the Winton Triangle’s history on national and regional radio, at colleges and universities, museums and to civic groups. The North Carolina Office of Archives and History accepted four of his nominations for highway historical markers.

A native of Cofield, a village in the Winton Triangle, Marvin Jones began this project a decade ago by scanning the photograph collection of relatives and neighbors.  The Winton Triangle digital collection now has over 7,000 files of photographs, documents, maps, audio and video recordings.

Jones is the owner of Marvin T. Jones & Associates, a professional photography company in Washington, DC.  He has  published in well-known magazines and has worked in South America, the Caribbean and Africa.  Howard University and Roanoke-Chowan Community College hosted Jones’ exhibit on Somalia.

For more information, click here.

Brown Babies Germany’s Forgotten Children – Henriette Cain

Research at the National Archives & Beyond
BlogTalk Radio
2013-01-17

Bernice Bennett, Host

Are you searching for your family?  Are you German, Brown and want to learn more about your American or German heritage?

Join Henriette Cain Genealogist, Search Consultant and Secretary of the Black German Cultural Society (BGCS), Inc.  Mrs. Cain – a brown baby adoptee successfully found all members of her birth family. She is now helping others with their searches through her company S.U.N. Public Records Research. She offers family history research and strives to reunite families and friends. She is prominently featured in the documentary – “Brown Babies: Deutschlands verlorene Kinder“.

Mrs. Cain is also a Founding Member, co-founder and former Vice President of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical  Society of the Northen Illinois Southern Wisconsin Chapter; a member of the Noxubee County (MS) Historical Society, and a former volunteer Librarian for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints Family History Library.

Play in your default player here.

Fathers of Conscience with Bernie D. Jones

Research at the National Archives & Beyond
Blogtalk Radio
2012-11-08, 21:00 EST (2012-11-09, 02:00Z)

Bernice Bennett, Co-Host

Natonne Elaine Kemp, Co-Host

Bernie D. Jones, Associate Professor of Law
Suffolk University, Boston, Massachusetts

Fathers of Conscience: Mixed-Race Inheritance in the Antebellum South

Bernice Bennett and Natonne Elaine Kemp welcome author Bernie D. Jones for an engaging discussion about her book—Fathers of Conscience: Mixed-Race Inheritance in the Antebellum South. Jones is Associate Professor, Suffolk University Law School.  She is a graduate of the New York University Law School and the University of Virginia Department of History.

Fathers of Conscience examines high-court decisions in the antebellum South that involved wills in which white male planters bequeathed property, freedom, or both to women of color and their mixed-race children. These men, whose wills were contested by their white relatives, had used trusts and estates law to give their slave partners and children official recognition and thus circumvent the law of slavery. The will contests that followed determined whether that elevated status would be approved or denied by courts of law.

For more information, click here.