Upcoming Event on Zoom: Locating Slavery's Legacies Monumental Opportunities (July 12, 2023)

The "Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation at the University of the South" team invites you to an event about their "Locating Slavery's Legacies Database Project," which collects lost cause memorials on college campuses:

"Please join the Roberson Project for an online introduction to the Locating Slavery's Legacies database, a digital repository of information about memorials on college campuses that harbor connections to slavery, the Civil War, and the Lost Cause.

The Roberson Project at the University of the South is seeking new campus partners – faculty members, librarians and archivists, undergraduate and graduate students – to work with us in building up this database over the 2023-2024 academic year.

The principal objective of the database (LSLdb) in collecting and mapping this information is to foster analysis and understanding of the impact of Lost Cause movements on higher education in the United States in the 160 years after emancipation. The database also is designed to incorporate "anti-Lost Cause" memorials, especially those on the campuses of HBCUs, established to defy the racist legacies of slavery after emancipation. We seek a fuller picture of post-Civil War memorialization on college and university campuses.

We have just finished a "pilot year" of testing the database in collaboration with colleagues and students at Elon, Furman, Meredith, VMI, Washington and Lee, Western Kentucky, William and Mary, and Wofford. Thanks to their contributions and productive engagement, we are able to launch the first phase of the website this coming September. We anticipate a dozen or more new partners for the coming year.

This Zoom event is tailored to those of you who were unable to attend our recent public presentations on the database at the Universities Studying Slavery conference at UNC Chapel Hill in March and our teach-in at Atlanta History Center in April. We will explain how the database works as an accessible tool that enables research into the history of campus infrastructure, fosters student learning, and engages with contemporary questions about the influence of Civil War memory and the Lost Cause on higher education in the United States.

You can learn more about the Locating Slavery's Legacies database at locatinglegacies.org. If you have questions, please write to us at locatinglegacies@sewanee.edu.

Pre-registration for the web event is required. Please go to the website https://www.locatinglegacies.org to pre-register.

Participation will be limited to persons who are employed by or enrolled in a college, university, or other institution of higher or public education.

The Roberson Project worked with the development team of Omeka in building the database, which uses the Omeka S archiving platform.

The database is funded by a "Legacies of American Slavery" grant from the Council of Independent Colleges and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University's MacMillan Center. The Legacies grant is funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation."