If Booker T. Washington never knew when he was born, how are we so sure about it now?
my attention focused on this: “the year was 1858 or 1859.” I had just made a short slideshow on Washington’s life, highlighting his leadership at the Tuskegee Institute and his fundraising prowess, how he helped erect thousands of Black schools in the rural South. My slideshow recorded his lifespan as 1856 to 1915.
I checked the Wikipedia article on Booker T. Washington. It not only provided his birth year but the specific date: April 5, 1856. This was puzzling. In 1901, when he wrote Up from Slavery, Washington knew neither his birthday nor his birth year—and he guessed he was born two or three years after 1856.
In the archives of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, our writer found a previously unknown audiotape of an interview with a woman who'd been born into slavery.
There are, it turns out, many reasons why elderly black people in the early 20th century might have reflected happily upon their bondage in the 19th.
One reason, the literature points out, is that almost all of the WPA interviewers were white Southerners. Some had grandparents (and even parents) who had owned the very people they were interviewing—in Southern towns still under the terroristic grip of Jim Crow. (Faulk’s grandparents had owned slaves, though he never talked publicly about that, and it’s likely that his parents had known the family who owned Harriet Smith.) Some interviewers – including Faulk, when he interviewed Harriet Smith — posed leading questions encouraging ex-slaves to emphasize the positive. Faulk asked Smith, “Some folks awful good to their slaves, weren’t they?” Lately it has come to light that when the answers weren’t positive, many WPA regional administrators abridged the transcripts. Or they mothballed the interviews entirely and never sent them to Washington.
As Eugene Bullard fought for freedom for all Americans, his older brother disappeared in the Jim Crow South.
I found Terrence as I dug through an archive at Columbus State University. Combing through old clippings, I spotted him in a 1997 Columbus Times Newspaper article that identifies him as a distant relative of Eugene Bullard. Terrence won a history contest in middle school with a presentation about Bullard.
He told the competition judges a remarkable story: Bullard, the son of a former slave, fled the Jim Crow South in the early 20th century, joined a band of gypsies in Georgia, and stowed away on a ship for Europe. He told the judges that when Bullard arrived there, he boxed professionally, he played the drums in a jazz band, he rubbed elbows with people like Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker and Langston Hughes, he fought for the French Foreign Legion in World War I and was severely wounded. He told them Bullard would eventually become the world’s first black military pilot and fight the Germans in the air. He spied for the French Resistance during World War II. A refugee, he narrowly escaped to the United States when the Germans stormed into France.
....
Terrence carries with him another family story, a darker, more complicated one. Like Bullard’s story, Terrence first heard it from his grandmother, Alice. As Eugene Bullard was on his way to fame and fortune abroad, his older brother Hector was lynched in Georgia, according to Alice. When he was a young boy, Terrence had no idea what the word “lynching” meant. When Alice explained it to him, Terrence asked why anyone would want to do that to Hector. To Alice, the answer was simple: because he was black.
We know that legal terminology can be tricky, so we’ve got you covered Read More »
We are pleased to announce the release of “Doing History, Season 4: Understanding the Fourth Amendment.” Law is all around us. This 4-part Doing History series explains the early American origins and importance of the fourth amendment. Although it doesn’t always make headlines as often as some others, the fourth amendment to the United States Constitution undergirds foundational rights. We also use the example of the fourth amendment to explore the history of law as a field of study, how it differs from other historical subjects, and how lawyers and historians view and use legal history differently.
We know that legal terminology can be tricky, so we’ve got you covered with this handy blog post we’ve titled: “Doing History 4 Legal Lexicon; or A Useful List of Terms You Might Not Know.” Each week, we’ll add more terms from new episodes until the series ends.
Listen to the first episode in the series, where the BFWorld team goes to the United States National Archives to investigate the Constitution and Bill of Rights. During their visit, they talk with with Jessie Kratz, First Historian of the National Archives, and Mary Sarah Bilder, Founders Professor of Law at Boston College.
For those who might be a little rusty, the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution reads:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
In "Do Objects Lie?" Dr. Christopher Allison, Collegiate Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago, and Dr. Carla Cevasco, Assistant Pro...
Is material culture as inherently untrustworthy? I was once at a conference roundtable where one attendee claimed that “Material culture is so elitist, just rich people’s stuff in museums.” Fortunately, a historical archaeologist in the room begged to differ, arguing that archaeology offered a rich record of people who did not necessarily leave written sources behind. When I recently required my students to analyze both a material and a textual source, they concluded that material sources were inherently more difficult to work with than their written counterparts. “Once I describe the object, there’s nothing left to say about it,” one student complained.
Carla Cevasco, “Do Objects Lie? A New Video for Teaching About Material Evidence,” The Juno: A Group Blog on Early American History, May 31, 2018.
Looking thru the sylveon tag when i should b studying but its a mental health break bc im studying punishment in early modern france and my god those early modern europeans were on smth
We’re lucky that our interns love coffee, because for this summer’s final project, I selected Russell Greenberg’s Field notes, Xalapa and Ch
We’re lucky that our interns love coffee, because for this summer’s final project, I selected Russell Greenberg’s Field notes, Xalapa and Chiapas, Mexico, 2001 for a full conservation treatment... So why was this particular field book selected for treatment? When cataloger Lesley Parilla reviewed the 2016 accession of the Center’s research records (Accession 16-179, Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center), she noticed that there was apparent mold growth from an unknown “moisture event”.
While we don’t think it had gotten coffee spilt upon it, the author’s field work in the rainforests of Mexico offered plenty of damp conditions and opportunity for inoculation by fungal spores. The rest of the collection seemed unaffected, so we immediately isolated it in the collections freezer to stabilize it until we could turn from our other conservation projects to its treatment. The nature of the book’s physical condition offered locale-based evidence about his field observations, and we chose to reduce the risk of that mold affecting our users and the adjacent collections.
