CLAW History
In 1994, the College established the Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World to promote scholarship on the Lowcountry, the Atlantic World, and the connections between the two, to strengthen the College’s instructional program, and to promote public understanding of the region and its place in a broader international context.
New Publications from USC Press and the Atlantic World Series!
- Shield, David, ed. Material Culture in Anglo-America: Regional Identity and Urbanity in the Tidewater, Lowcountry, and Caribbean (Fall 2009).
Material Culture in Anglo-America examines the extent to which regions project cultural identities through the material forms of objects, buildings, and constructed environments. Utilizing more than 130 illustrations and essays by scholars representing a variety of disciplines, this volume explores the material constitution of the West Indies, Carolina lowcountry, and Chesapeake Tidewater—three historically related regions that shared strong likenesses in culture, commerce, and political development in the colonial through antebellum eras, yet also cultivated the distinctive regional flair with which they are now associated. Without reducing regionality to iconic signatures of place, the essays in this volume explore broadly the built and crafted artifacts that define and confine cultural identity in these geographic areas, locating regionality in the distinctive uses of objects as well as in their design and creation.
The contributors—an impressive and international array of historical archeologists, art historians, literary historians, museum curators, social historians, geographers, and historians of material culture—combine theoretical reflections on the poetics of representative material culture with empirical studies of how things were made and put to use in specific locales. They argue that there was a "presence of place" in the built environments of these regions but that boundaries were imprecise. The essays illustrate how the material culture of urban and rural settings interpenetrated each other and discuss the complications of class, race, religion, and settler culture within developing regions to reveal how all of these factors influenced the richness of crafted artifacts. The study is further grounded in several striking case studies that dramatically demonstrate how constructed things can embody communal self-understanding while still participating in an overarching transatlantic cultural community.
In addition to Shields, the contributors are Benjamin L. Carp, Bernard L. Herman, Paul E. Hoffman, Laura Croghan Kamoie, Eric Klingelhofer, Roger Leech, Carl Lounsbury, Maurie D. McInnis, Matthew Mulcahy, R. C. Nash, Louis P. Nelson, Paula Stone Reed, Jeffrey H. Richards, Natalie Zacek, and Martha A. Zierden.
- Bodek, Richard and Simon Lewis, eds. The Fruits of Exile: Jewish Intellectual Immigration to America in the Age of Fascism (Spring 2010).
The Fruits of Exile casts new light on the history of émigré thinkers escaping from the rise of fascism in Central Europe. Editors Richard Bodek and Simon Lewis, along with an international group of contributors, emphasize the contributions to American and British culture by the European intellectual diaspora of the 1930s through their careful study of artists, scientists, and cultural figures often ignored in previous studies of the era.
The contributors explore the careers in exile of novelists Thomas Mann and Herman Broch; philosophers Karl Mannheim, Walter Kaufmann, and Theodore Adorno; artists Joseph Albers and Max Reinhardt; composers Arnold Schoenberg and Béla Bartók; and a host of other participants in the pre–World War II exodus from Central Europe. The essays enhance understanding of the diverse range of exile experience by analyzing larger groups of exiles than in earlier studies, by broadening the geographic area examined, and by delving into the initial difficulties these immigrants had in finding acceptance and welcome on foreign soil. The fresh insights on this underexplored moment in history illustrate that intellectual careers of the highest order are both personally driven—based strongly on the life of great thinkers and creators—and structurally shaped by local and international patterns of culture.
In addition to the editors, the contributors are Gudrun Brokoph-Mauch, Yael Epstein, Sabine Feisst, Tibor Frank, David Kettler, Colin Loader, David Pickus, James Schmidt, Jeremy Telman, and Donald Wallace.
What's New in Spring 2010?
Faculty Seminar
January 29, 2010 - 'Godly Carriage and Christian Behavior': God's Masculinity in Puritan New England, 1620-1650, 3:15 pm, Addleston Library, Room 227, 205 Calhoun Street, Corner of Coming and Calhoun.
Wachovia Distinguished Public Lecture Series
April 22, 2010 - Deliver Us From Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South, 7:00 pm, Arnold Hall, Jewish Studies Center, 96 Wentworth St. Dr. Lacy Ford, professor of history and chair of the department at the University of South Carolina.
February 18 - 20, 2010
Women in the Iberian-American Atlantic (1500-1800)
Registration Now Open!
Papers Now Avalable On-line!
(for conference web page click here)
The Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW) at the College of Charleston calls for papers on Women in the Iberian and Latin American Atlantic World. The conference will take place in Charleston, South Carolina, from Feb. 18 to 20, 2010. This interdisciplinary conference welcomes papers on Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American history, literature, cultural production, etc. We hope to examine questions such as: Who were the women that traveled from the Iberian Peninsula to the New World or vice-versa? What ideas did they bring with them? What influence did women who did not physically travel have on the Atlantic world? What role did women play in creating an Atlantic network? What can women’s experience in the Atlantic World tell us about the Atlantic cultural production, literary exchanges, economy, race relations, religion, etc., between 1500 and 1800?
For more information, click here or contact the conference coordinator, Dr. Sarah E. Owens (College of Charleston).
February 25-27, 2010
2010 Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, 1750-1850
The Consortium on the Revolutionary Era (CRE) provides a venue for the presentation of original research on not only the revolutionary history of Europe of this era but also the Atlantic World and beyond. This conference is being held at the College of Charleston and the Francis Marion Hotel located in the center of Charleston's historic district.
Featured speakers include: Jorge Canizares-Esquerra (Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas), David S. Shields (McClintock Professor of Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina), and Leora Auslander (Professor of MOdern European History at the University of Chicago).
For more information contact the conference chair Dr. Carol Harrison (University of South Carolina) at ceharrison@mailbox.sc.edu or Dr. Bill Olejniczak (College of Charleston) at olejniczakw@cofc.edu.
March 11 - 13, 2010
Race, Labor & Citizenship in the Post-Emancipation South
Late Registration Now Available!
Schedule Now Available! (click here)
(for conference web page click here)
Keynote by Steven Hahn
author of the prize-winning
A Nation Under Our Feet:
Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
One hundred years ago the outstanding African American scholar-activist, W. E. B. Du
Bois, presented to the American Historical Association a paper entitled "Reconstruction
and Its Benefits.” In the paper and in his seminal Black Reconstruction, published a
quarter century later, Du Bois not only exposed the racial assumptions underpinning the
dominant view of the period following slave emancipation: he insisted that the struggles
over slavery and the shape of the freedom that followed were central to the history of
America’s working people, calling it “the kernel and meaning of the labor movement in
the United States.” Over the past generation, historians have built upon Du Bois’s
powerful insight about the connections between race, labor and citizenship in the postemancipation
South, producing some of the most compelling scholarship in the field of
U. S. history. (image source: South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina)
Conference Organizers: Brian Kelly (Queen’s University Belfast), Susan E. O’Donovan (University of Memphis), Bruce E. Baker (Royal Holloway–University of London), Bernard E. Powers Jr. (College of Charleston), Simon K. Lewis (College of Charleston - CLAW); and Kerry Taylor (The Citadel)
For more information, click here or contact the conference coordinator, Dr. Brian Kelly, Queen's University, Belfast.
Hines Prize: Call for Manuscripts
Do you have a manuscript in hand or in preparation that would fit the scope of our book series? Do you know others who do?
If your manuscript is for a first book you should consider entering it for the competition for the fourth biennial award of the Hines Prize given to the best first book relating to any aspect of the Carolina Lowcountry and/or the Atlantic World.
The prize carries a cash award of $1,000 and preferential consideration by the University of South Carolina Press for the Program's book series.
The Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World Book Series
Next Deadline: May 1, 2011
For Students:
Student Research Travel Grants (click for information)
For Educators:
Are you looking for books, websites and information about the Transatlantic Slave Trade? Visit our extensive bibliography and links pages.
UNESCO’s African Passages
In 2004, the Transatlantic Slave Trade Education Project (TST) of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) encouraged each participating member state to develop a “Site of Memory” website about their region as an educational resource for teachers and other educators around the world. An important aim of UNESCO’s Transatlantic Slave Trade Education Project is the preservation and protection of places of memory related to the Slave Trade. Over 100 schools in 23 nations around the Atlantic World participate in this project.
A “site of memory” is a contemporary geographic or physical location with cultural, spiritual, or historic elements that can be interpreted to teach some or all of the themes of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. It can include buildings, the natural environment or the site of a significant event.
UNESCO’s African Passages is intended to be a prototype “Site of Memory” website. Focusing on the Ashley River Historic District of the Lowcountry surrounding Charleston, South Carolina, it explores the journey of Africans from freedom to slavery, the transformation of the landscape and development of wealth generated by the work of enslaved Africans, and the surviving traditions of those individuals in contemporary South Carolina.
UNESCO’s African Passages is a multimedia presentation and demonstrates not only the past contributions of enslaved people but reveals as well the enduring legacy of those contributions—in people, in music, in naming practices, in the built environment—as part of our effort to reveal the "living" past. Created and refined through a collaboration of academic and public historians, historic site and museum professionals, interested individuals and educators from around the world, this website contains spoken word and musical recordings, a series of primary documents—including maps and plantation records, as well as a detailed educational component with lesson plans and additional activities for teachers’ use in integrating the materials into their classrooms.
Related Links:
The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
www.unesco.org
More about UNESCO’s Transatlantic Slave Trade Education Project
www.unesco.org/education/asp/tst
The UNESCO Slave Route Project
www.unesco.org/culture/slaveroute
