Participants

Stephen Berry is the Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era at the University of Georgia. His research explores the intersections of race, class, gender, family, violence and death in the 19th-century South. He is author or editor of six books on America in the mid-19th century, including “House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, A Family Divided by War,” a Book of the Month Club main selection, and “Weirding the War: Stories From the Civil War’s Ragged Edges.” Berry is secretary-treasurer of the Southern Historical Association; a co-director of the Center for Virtual History; and a co-editor of the UnCivil Wars series at the University of Georgia Press. A Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, Berry helps lead the Digital Humanities Initiative at the University of Georgia. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Richard Carwardine is pro-vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford and former president of Corpus Christi College. His research and publications center on the United States between 1776 and the Civil War, with a particular interest in the life, presidency, and international legacy of Abraham Lincoln. His books include “Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America,” “Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power,” “The Global Lincoln” and “Lincoln’s Sense of Humor.” He is a fellow of the British Academy, a founding fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, freeman of the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers, and was inducted as a laureate of The Lincoln Academy of Illinois and awarded the Order of Lincoln by the governor of Illinois in 2009 as a bicentennial laureate.

Joshua Casmir Catalano is a history lecturer at Clemson University and a doctoral candidate at George Mason University. Upon receiving his master’s in American Culture Studies from Bowling Green State University, he spent three years as a research assistant at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, where he served as managing editor of Digital Humanities Now. His research interests include Revolutionary America, Native American history, memory, digital history and public history. His dissertation examines the intertwined and contested memory of the Gnadenhutten Massacre and the burning of Col. William Crawford. He has published work in the journals Ohio History and Current Research in Digital History.

Catherine Clinton holds the Denman Chair of American History at the University of Texas-San Antonio. Clinton earned her bachelor’s from Harvard, her master’s from the University of Sussex, and her Ph.D. from Princeton. She has served as president of the Southern Historical Association and has taught at The Citadel, Wesleyan, Brandeis and Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She is the author or editor of 25 books, including “The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South,” “The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century,” “Southern Families at War: Loyalty and Conflict in the Civil War South” and “Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom.” Her books “Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War” and “Mrs. Lincoln: A Life” are among several that have been History Book Club selections.

Armand Derfner has been involved with the right to vote for more than 50 years, including a half-dozen major U.S. Supreme Court cases, frequent testimony before U.S. Senate and House committees, and extensive writing and lecturing on the subject. On another front, he is currently involved in a case challenging the constitutionality of the South Carolina Heritage Act. In addition to his law practice, he is Scholar in Residence in Constitutional Law at the Charleston School of Law.

Bobby Donaldson is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Center for Civil Rights History and Research at the University of South Carolina-Columbia. He is the lead scholar for the Columbia SC 63 documentary initiative. Donaldson received his undergraduate degree in History and African American Studies from Wesleyan University and his Ph.D. in American History from Emory University. Previously, he held fellowships at Dartmouth College and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. His is the recent recipient of the South Carolina Governor's Award for Historic Preservation and the South Carolina Governor's Award for the Humanities.

Gregory P. Downs is a professor of history at University of California, Davis and the author of two books on Reconstruction: “After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War” and “Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South.” With Kate Masur, he co-edited “The World the Civil War Made,” co-edited the National Park Service's first handbook on Reconstruction, co-wrote the National Park Service theme study on Reconstruction, and helped lobby for the first National Park site devoted to Reconstruction, which was proclaimed by President Obama at Beaufort, South Carolina in 2017. Downs is finishing his book “The Second American Revolution,” slated to appear in 2019.

Don H. Doyle , McCausland Professor of History Emeritus, University of South Carolina, is the author of several books, most recently “The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War,” and has edited the essay collection “American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe, and the Crisis of the 1860s.” He is currently writing a sequel to “The Cause of All Nations;" "Viva Lincoln” will begin with the international response to Lincoln’s assassination and Union victory in 1865 and will follow the flurry of revolutions, anti-imperialist uprisings, slave emancipation movements and democratic reforms that swept through the Euro-American world after 1865.

Peter Eisenstadt is an independent professional historian. He previously served as managing editor of The Encyclopedia of New York City and editor-in-chief of The Encyclopedia of New York State. He the author of several titles, including “Rochdale Village: Robert Moses, 6,000 Families, and New York City’s Great Experiment in Integrated Housing”, which won the New York Society Library Prize for the best book on New York City history and the American Political Science Award for the best book on urban politics. He also co-authored “Visions of a Better World: Howard Thurman’s Pilgrimage to India and the Origins of African American Non-Violence,” which was named one of the year’s 10 best books on religion and spirituality in 2011. His biography “Against the Hounds of Hell: A Life of Howard Thurman” is forthcoming.

Paul Finkelman is president of Gratz College in Melrose Park, Pennsylvania. He received his bachelor’s degree in American studies from Syracuse University and his Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago, and was a fellow in law and humanities at Harvard Law School. Finkelman is a legal historian interested in issues of race, slavery and the Constitution. He has lectured on slavery, human trafficking and human rights issues at the United Nations, throughout the United States, and in more than a dozen countries. The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, Finkelman has published more than 200 scholarly articles and authored or edited more than 50 books, including “An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity” and “Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson.” His most recent book is “Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court.

Eric Foner , DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, is one of only two individuals to serve as president of these three major historical organizations: the American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians and Society of American Historians. His award-winning books focus on the intersections of intellectual, political and social history and the history of American race relations, including “Reconstruction, 1863-1877: America’s Unfinished Revolution," winner of the Bancroft Prize and Los Angeles Times book prize; “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery", which was awarded the Lincoln Prize, Bancroft Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for History; and “Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad”, winner of the history award from the New York Historical Society and a New York Times best-seller. Foner received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching from Columbia University. As co-curator of two award-winning historical exhibitions, and through frequent media appearances, he shares historical knowledge with a broad public outside academia. His next book, “The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Changed the Constitution,” is slated for 2019 publication.

J. Drew Lanham is Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology Master Teacher and Certified Wildlife Biologist at Clemson University. As a Black American, he’s intrigued with how culture and ethnic prisms can bend perceptions of nature and its care. His “connecting the conservation dots” and “coloring the conservation conversation” messages have been delivered internationally. He is active on a number of conservation boards including the South Carolina Wildlife Federation, South Carolina Audubon, Aldo Leopold Foundation, BirdNote and the American Birding Association. He is an inaugural Fellow of the Audubon-Toyota Together Green initiative and is a member of the advisory board for the North American Association of Environmental Education. He is a widely-published author and award-nominated poet, writing about his experiences as a birder, hunter and "wild, wandering soul." He is the author of “The Home Place-Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature.”

William Lasser is the director of the Calhoun Honors College and Alumni Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Clemson University. He is the author of numerous books and articles on law and American politics, including "The Supreme Court and Critical Realignment,” “The Limits of Judicial Power: The Supreme Court and American Politics,” and “Benjamin V. Cohen: Architect of the New Deal.” He has taught courses in constitutional law and American government for the past 25 years, and received the Clemson Alumni Master Teacher Award in 1993.

James W. Loewen spent two years at the Smithsonian surveying leading high school textbooks of American history, only to find an embarrassing blend of bland optimism, blind nationalism and plain misinformation, as detailed in “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” likely the best-selling book by a living sociologist. In his 1999 book “Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong,” he called for the toppling of Confederate monuments. A second edition of the best-selling book in public history is due in early 2019. Loewen also discovered that in many states most communities were "Sundown Towns" that kept out African Americans and sometimes other groups for decades. (Some still do.) He has been an expert witness in 50-100 civil rights cases. Other books include “The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White,” “Social Science in the Courtroom” and “Mississippi: Conflict and Change,” with co-authors. He also co-edited “The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader.” His "Five Myths About Why the South Seceded" was the most viewed article at the Washington Post in 2011.

Matthew Long is a candidate for a master’s degree in history at Clemson University. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh, majoring in Germanic languages and literature, and receiving a certificate in West European studies. His interests include the cultural history of the Southern United States, digital humanities and central European political and cultural history. Long’s thesis work will explore transnational and comparative political history surrounding myth, mythmaking and nationalism in interwar Germany, Italy and the United States.

Kate Masur is an associate professor of history at Northwestern University. She writes about the intersections of law, politics and everyday life, focusing on how Americans grappled with questions of race and equality after the abolition of slavery in both the North and South. Her most recent book is the republication of a largely forgotten classic from 1942, “They Knew Lincoln,” by John E. Washington. Masur is the author of “An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, D.C.” and numerous articles on emancipation and black politics during and after the Civil War. With Gregory P. Downs, she co-edited the essay collection “The World the Civil War Made.” She and Downs worked extensively with the National Park Service on projects related to the history of Reconstruction, including co-authoring the National Historic Landmarks theme study on the period. She is working on a book project about rights, police powers and the origins of Reconstruction-era constitutional change.

Lawrence T. McDonnell received his Ph.D. in history at the University of Illinois, where he studied with Vernon Burton, and is an assistant professor of history at Iowa State University. He has published articles on Southern, labor and gender history in a range of essay collections and journals, including the Journal of Social History and Labour/Le Travail. McDonnell is the author of “Performing Disunion: The Coming of the Civil War in Charleston, South Carolina.” He just completed a book manuscript on a notorious antebellum confidence man, “Chasing Dave: The Unbelievable Lives of an American Scoundrel.” He is writing a study that places class struggle at the heart of military history: “Bloody Work: The Civil War and the Making of the American Working Class, 1846-1877.”

Edna Greene Medford is interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and a professor of history at Howard University, where she has taught for 31 years. Her research focuses on slavery, the Civil War (including the Lincoln presidency) and Reconstruction. “Lincoln and Emancipation” is her most recent book. Medford serves on several national advisory boards and is a frequent contributor to historical programing produced by cable television. Her awards include the Lincoln Diploma of Honor from Lincoln Memorial University, an alumni achievement award from the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Illinois and the 2013 Professor of the Year Award from the Howard University Student Association. Medford was awarded the Order of Lincoln by the governor of Illinois in 2009 as a bicentennial laureate.

J. Brent Morris is an associate professor of history, chair of the humanities department at the University of South Carolina Beaufort and director of its Institute for the Study of the Reconstruction Era. He has published “Oberlin, Hotbed of Abolitionism: College, Community, and the Fight for Freedom and Equality in Antebellum America,” winner of the Henry Howe Prize, and “Yes Lord I Know the Road: A Documentary History of African Americans in South Carolina, 1526-2008.” Morris has been awarded the South Carolina Historical Society's Malcolm C. Clark Award; the USC Breakthrough Star for Research and Scholarship, American Alliance of Museums Gold MUSE award and the Award of the Order of the South from the Southern Academy of Letters, Arts, and Sciences.

Bennett Parten is a Ph.D. student in history at Yale University. He earned a master’s in history from Clemson and his bachelor’s degree from the University of Georgia. He works broadly on race, slavery, abolition and emancipation in the 19th century United States. In 2017, his essay “Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and Georgia’s Refugee Slaves” was published in the Georgia Historical Quarterly. His most recent research explored how American abolitionists pioneered early conceptions of human rights.

Adrienne Petty , a historian of the American South, studies the transformation of southern farming and rural life since the Civil War. She is an associate professor at William & Mary, where she teaches courses in U.S. history. Petty and Mark Schultz co-directed the oral history project “Breaking New Ground: A History of African American Farm Owners,” which produced more than 300 interviews of southern black farmers and their descendants. Petty and Schultz are writing a history of African American farm owners that draws upon on the interviews. Petty’s book “Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina Since the Civil War” won the H.L. Mitchell Award of the Southern Historical Association and the Theodore Saloutos Award of the Agricultural History Society.

Jerald Podair is a professor of history and the Robert S. French Professor of American Studies at Lawrence University. He is the author of “The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill Brownsville Crisis,” a finalist for the Organization of American Historians’ Liberty Legacy Foundation Award. His other books include “Bayard Rustin: American Dreamer; The Struggle for Equality,” (co-edited with Vernon Burton); “The Routledge History of the 20th Century United States” (co-edited with Darren Dochuk); and “City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles,” which received the Harold Seymour Medal from the Society for American Baseball Research and was a finalist for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. He is writing “Promised Lands: A History of the American People in the 20th Century,” slated for publication by Princeton University Press. He received the Society of American Historians’ Allan Nevins Prize for “literary distinction in the writing of history,” has served on the Wisconsin Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and is a Fellow of the New York Academy of History.

Heather Cox Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College and an expert on American political and economic history. She is the author of five books, including “To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party,” “Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre” and “West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War.” Richardson is a national commentator on American political history and the Republican Party. She is currently at work on “How the South Won the Civil War: A History of Democracy and Oligarchy in America” and also a graphic novel covering the years from 1865-1904.

Mark Schultz is a professor of history at Lewis University, where he teaches U.S. and global history. Schultz and Adrienne Petty co-directed the oral history project “Breaking New Ground: A History of African American Farm Owners,” which produced more than 300 interviews of southern black farmers and their descendants. Schultz and Petty are writing a history of African American farm owners that draws upon on the interviews. Schultz’s scholarship addresses the African American experience in the Jim Crow rural South. His book “The Rural Face of White Supremacy: Beyond Jim Crow” was designated as an editor’s choice by The Atlantic Monthly.

Christopher M. Span is the associate dean for graduate programs in the College of Education and an associate professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a historian of education and specializes in the educational history of African Americans in the 19th century. He is a faculty athletics representative for the University of Illinois and the Big Ten Conference and serves as vice president of Division F (History and Historiography) for the American Educational Research Association. Span is the author of “From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse: African American Education in Mississippi, 1862-1875.” He has published numerous articles and book chapters on the educational history of African Americans, and is a co-editor of the volume “Using Past as Prologue: Contemporary Perspectives on African American Educational History.” He is drafting a book manuscript on past and present efforts to make education a fundamental and constitutional right in the United States.

Robyn Spencer focuses on Black social protest after World War II, radicalism and gender in her scholarship. She is currently Visiting Endowed Chair in Women and Gender Studies at Brooklyn College and is tenured in the Department of History at Lehman College. Her first book, “The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland,” was a finalist for the Benjamin Hooks Institute National Book Award and received honorable mention for the Letitia Woods Brown Book Prize sponsored by the Association of Black Women’s Historians. In 2016, she received a Mellon fellowship at Yale University for her book project “To Build the World Anew: Black Liberation Politics and the Movement Against the Vietnam War.” The book will explore how and why the anti-imperialist struggle for Vietnamese independence became a rallying point for U.S.-based Black activists. A Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society and an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science will support further work on the book.

Marjorie J. Spruill is Distinguished Professor Emerita from the University of South Carolina. Her work focuses on women and politics from the suffrage movement to the present, and also on the American South. She is the author of “Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics,” which addresses the rise of the modern women’s rights movement to a peak period of success, the mobilization of social conservatives in opposition, and the impact on American political culture. Spruill is also the author of “New Women of the New South: The Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States.” She has edited five books on suffrage, including “One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement,” the companion volume to the PBS documentary “One Woman, One Vote.”

Randall J. Stephens is an associate professor of British and American Studies at the University of Oslo. From 2012 to 2018, he was an associate professor and reader in history and American studies at Northumbria University in Newcastle Upon Tyne, England. Stephens is a historian of religion, the South, environmentalism, politics, and popular culture and music in Britain and America. He is the author of “The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South;” a co-author with physicist Karl Giberson of “The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age;” and the editor of “Recent Themes in American Religious History.” His latest book is “The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock 'n' Roll.” Stephens has also written for The Atlantic, Salon, the Wilson Quarterly, History Today, Christian Century, The Conversation, The Independent, The Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times.

Rhondda Robinson Thomas is the Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson University, where she teaches early African American literature and American literature. She is the author of “Claiming Exodus: A Cultural History of Afro-Atlantic Identity, 1774-1903,” co-edited “The South Carolina Roots of African American Thought” and contributed the chapter “Locating Slave Narratives” to the collection “Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative.” She is the acquisitions co-editor for the African American Literature series at the Clemson University Press/Liverpool University Press partnership and is the editor of vol. 1, 1750-1800 of the “African American Literature in Transition” series to be published by the Cambridge University Press. Her essays have appeared in American Literary History, Southern Quarterly, and African American Review. Thomas is the director of the research project “Call My Name: African Americans in Early Clemson University History,” for which she has been awarded a Whiting Foundation Public Engagement Fellowship, a gift from James and Edith Bostic Jr. through the Clemson University Foundation, and grants from NEH, South Carolina Humanities and the Clemson University Office of the Provost.

Cecil Williams is a professional photographer, videographer and author of six books, including “Out-of-the-Box in Dixie.” By the age of 15, he had become a freelance photographer for JET magazine, the Pittsburgh Courier and The Associated Press. His books provide an intimate, firsthand account of the origin of the civil rights movement. A member of the American Society of Media Photographers and a contributor to Getty Images, Williams is known for his photographs and documentation of the Orangeburg Massacre, which occurred in 1968 in his hometown. Williams was recently awarded the Order of the Palmetto, South Carolina’s highest civilian honor, and the Governor’s Award from SC Humanities. He also has been profiled by the Smithsonian Civil Rights History Project.

Gavin Wright is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Economic History Emeritus at Stanford University. He received his bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. from Yale University. Wright has a longstanding interest in the economy of the American South, traceable to his participation in a voting rights project in North Carolina in 1963. He is the author of “Slavery and American Economic Development,” an interpretation of the role of slavery and abolition in the rise of the U.S. economy. Wright’s most recent book is “Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South.” The book argues that the civil rights movement launched a genuine revolution in the South, in economic as well as moral and political life. “Sharing the Prize” was awarded the Alice Hanson Jones Prize as the best book in North American Economic History during 2013-14.

Amanda Arroyo was born in Valencia, Venezuela. To escape political unrest, her family relocated to Syracuse, New York, then Spartanburg, South Carolina. She completed her undergraduate degree in history and Spanish at Clemson University, where she is currently pursuing a master’s degree in history. Her research focuses on the identity of Southern women through death culture, as seen in wills and obituaries. Arroyo is active in the Latino community and was a founding member of the Clemson chapter of Hermandad de Sigma Iota Alpha Inc., the University’s first Latin-interest Greek organization.

Carmen Harris  is a professor of History at USC Upstate who teaches African-American, U.S., Southern, and Latin American history. Her research and teaching interests include African-American, Southern and South Carolina history. Dr. Harris served a six-year term as a member of the Board of Directors of the South Carolina Humanities Council, and has served on the Membership Committee and Minority Committee of the Southern Historical Association. Dr. Harris has published several articles and book chapters on various subjects related to African Americans in agricultural extension programs.