Richards Civil War Era Center

The library database "African Diaspora: 1860Present" contains content, including videos and personal accounts, related to migrations, communities and ideologies of people of African descent and includes never-before digitized content that will help Penn State University Libraries address geographic gaps in its primary resource holdings.

Today’s Muster post previews the December 2020 issue by reprinting the JCWE editors’ note. In addition to several fine articles, a review essay and a full slate... of book reviews, this issue features the first Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay written by Robert Colby. Read more here: https://wp.me/p1ZRcM-VS. See more

Be sure to check out PhD Candidate Cecily Zander's perspective in The Washington Post on the president's efforts to veto the National Defense Authorization Act! https://www.washingtonpost.com//trumps-veto-threat-key-de/

The Richards Center is deeply saddened to hear of Dr. Alphonso Grant's passing. Alphonso touched many lives including the participants of our mentoring program. He will be missed.

TODAY - Dec 3, 4:00 with Dr. Alexandra J. Finley - Journal of the Civil War Era Webinar Register here - https://psu.zoom.us/.../register/WN_gPhedr_1QKeSM8oJWziw0w An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America's Domestic Slave Trade was published by UNC Press in July 2020... From the press: Alexandra Finley adds crucial new dimensions to the boisterous debate over the relationship between slavery and capitalism by placing women's labor at the center of the antebellum slave trade, focusing particularly on slave traders' ability to profit from enslaved women's domestic, reproductive, and sexual labor. The slave market infiltrated every aspect of southern society, including the most personal spaces of the household, the body, and the self. Finley shows how women’s work was necessary to the functioning of the slave trade, and thus to the spread of slavery to the Lower South, the expansion of cotton production, and the profits accompanying both of these markets. Dr. Alexandra J. Finley is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. As a scholar, she is interested in the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in American society, particularly as these concepts relate to the economy and work. Her next book project continues to engage histories of household work in early America, focusing on the place of domestic labor in the marketplace of Atlantic port cities.