Another Day in Confederate Gettysburg

Today the Sons of Confederate Veterans ‘celebrated’ the confederate flag at the Peace Light Memorial on the battlefields of Gettysburg. The same battlefields where some of their ancestors suffered a pivotal defeat, and then kidnapped free Black Americans as they fled south. When I found out the SCV had obtained a permit from the National Park Service, I did likewise so I could stand up there with my homemade sign that connects the confederate flag to some of its most seminal moments in history: fighting for slavery in 1863, fighting for segregation in 1962, and murdering nine black South Carolinians in 2015. [excerpt

Don\u27t Fall for the Lies Behind Trump\u27s Calls for Unity

Each summer, more than half a million tourists come to Gettysburg, a battlefield in the most divisive conflict in American history. After marching around in the heat, thousands stop in at Mr. G’s for some of the best ice cream in town. As they battle with their melting orange pineapple, they can look across the street to the new Unity Park and the newest of Gettysburg’s 1,300-plus monuments. Most commemorate battle; this one commemorates unity. It encourages a “focus on unity and peace.” (excerpt

In Gettysburg, the Confederacy Won

Almost every day, I ride my bicycle past some of the over 1,300 statues and monuments commemorating the Civil War in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where I live. They are everywhere. None of them are of black people. The Battle of Gettysburg, fought over three days in July of 1863, is often considered the turning point of a war fought over the fate of slavery in America. Black people ultimately were the reason why over 165,000 soldiers came to this Pennsylvania town in the first place. But on the battlefield, as far as the physical memorials, they disappear. (excerpt

From No Country to Our Country! Living Out Manumission and the Boundaries of Rights and Citizenship, 1773-1855

During the Revolutionary War and the first decades of the early U.S. Republic, as free people of color sought to define their place in the new nation, they expressed little connection to an American nationality. But antebellum black leaders later articulated a powerful vision of Africans and Americans. As slaves and free blacks had done during the Revolutionary era, they based this African American identity in part upon a biblical view of human rights and a natural rights philosophy, but they also buttressed black identity formation by making a rights discourse the fulcrum of their argument for full inclusion in the polity. Coinciding with the rise of black parades as a public and confrontational means of asserting African American citizenship, black leaders constructed an African American identity intimately connected to legal notions of citizenship and rights stemming from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, thereby finding another means of publicly reinforcing to both white and black Americans as African American identity. Toward the close of the antebellum era, William C. Nell put the capstone on black self-definition as African American by constructing a patriotic black heritage. [excerpt

A formal process for the testing of servers

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The law will make you smart : Legal consciousness, rights rhetoric, and African American identity formation in Massachusetts, 1641-1855

In 1834, one of the informal leaders of Boston\u27s black community rebuked a black defendant in court, declaring the law will make you smart. This dissertation uncovers how African Americans in Massachusetts did indeed become \u27smart\u27 through an ongoing engagement with the law for over two hundred years. While the law could be oppressive, the accessibility of the legal system in Massachusetts enabled black women and men, slave and free, to learn to use the law in efforts to exercise some control over their daily lives. In the deteriorating racial atmosphere during the first half of the nineteenth century, the law remained one of the few arenas in which African Americans had any hope of experiencing the professed egalitarian ideals of the new republic. But the law also instructed African Americans about the value of establishing and maintaining individual legal boundaries between themselves and others, black and white. Through their engagement with the law, African Americans developed a legal consciousness that fostered a sense of themselves as autonomous individuals. After emancipation, that legal consciousness combined with a legal rights ideology to help define what it meant to be African American. That legal rights ideology eventually became an integral part of free black identity when African American leaders, who had expressed little identification with the new nation in the first decades after the American Revolution, began to explicitly identify black men and women as American in response to attempts by some whites to deny African Americans an American identity and citizenship. Black leaders anchored their argument in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and articulated a black identity defined in part by commitment to achieving full citizenship rights. When some black Bostonians balked in that commitment, some black leaders attempted to define them as standing outside of the black community. What it meant to be free, black, and American, remained a complex and at times contentious issue complicated by the evolution of legal consciousness and legal rights ideology

Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad, Black Agency, and the Coming of the Civil War The momentum toward uncovering and understanding the Underground Railroad is deservedly reaching a crescendo. With the impetus provided by the 1999 publication of John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger’s Runaway S...

Featured Piece

This year’s feature piece was written by Professor Scott Hancock, who is Chair of the History Department. He focuses on African American experiences before the Civil War, especially in law

Federal Home Loan Bank advances and commercial bank portfolio composition

This paper considers the role of Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) advances in stabilizing their commercial bank members' residential mortgage lending activities. Our theoretical model shows that using mortgage-related membership criteria or requiring mortgage-related collateral does not ensure that FHLB advances will be put to use for stabilizing members' financing of housing. Using panel vector autoregression (VAR) techniques, we estimate recent dynamic responses of U.S. bank portfolios to FHLB advance shocks, bank lending shocks, and macroeconomic shocks. Our empirical findings suggest that FHLB advances are just as likely to fund other types of bank credit as to fund single-family mortgages.