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.
Congratulations!
2009 Hines Prize Winner - Dr. Barry Stiefel
Barry received his Ph.D. from Tulane University in 2008. His dissertation about the forty plus synagogues erected by the Spanish-Portuguese-Dutch-English-American Jewish communities of the Atlantic basin from the 17th through 19th centuries will be published as Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World: A Social and Architectural History by the University of South Carolina Press.
South Carolina African American Heritage Commission awarded the Carolina Lowcountry & Atlantic World Program (CLAW) their 2008 Project Award at their annual meeting on January 22, 2009 for our work on the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007-2008.
College of Charleston awarded Dr. Simon K. Lewis (center), co-director of CLAW, the 2009 Alexander M. Sanders Jr. Presidential Legacy Award for Outstanding Public Service at the annual Excellence in Collegiate Education & Leadership (ExCEL) presentation on March 31, 2009.
What's New in Fall 2009?
- November 19: Dr. Barry L. Stiefel (visiting professor College of Charleston), 2009 Hines Prize Winner, Jewish Sancturary in the Atlantic World: A Social and Architectural History
7:00 pm, Levin Library, Jewish Studies Center, 2nd floor, 96 Wentworth Street
What's New in Spring 2010?
Mark your calendars for the following:
February 18 - 20, 2010
Women in the Iberian-American Atlantic (1500-1800)
Registration Now Open!
(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).
CALL FOR PAPERS
March 11 - 13, 2010
Race, Labor & Citizenship in the Post-Emancipation South
Deadline: November 20, 2009
Organized by the After Slavery Project
Co-sponsored by the Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World
(CLAW); the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture (College of Charleston); the (SC) African American Historical Alliance; School of Humanities and Social Sciences (The Citadel) and the Southern Labor Studies Association
other supporting organizations: Center for the Study of the American South (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill); Institute for Southern Studies (University of South Carolina at
Columbia); Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA); Charleston International
Longshoremen’s Association Local 1422; The Citadel Oral History Program;
W. E. B. Du Bois Institute (Harvard University)
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.
The After Slavery Project, a transatlantic research collaboration based at Queen’s University Belfast, welcomes proposals from scholars at all levels for individual papers and panels that showcase new and developing research on these and related themes across the former slave South, between the end of the Civil War and the early years of the twentieth century. As part of our commitment to making this scholarship widely available to teachers and students outside of higher education, labor and community activists, and interested citizens, we invite proposals for teachers’ workshops and panels that attempt to link new scholarship and public/popular history and/or online learning.
Suggested topics include:
- Labor and the Politics of Reconstruction
- Freedwomen, Citizenship and the Public Sphere
- Freedom, Property Rights and the Land Question in the Postwar South
- Black Workers, the Union Leagues and the Republican Party
- White Supremacy and the Prospects for Interracialism
- The Franchise and Grassroots Political Activism
- Coercion, Paramilitary Violence and Resistance
- Emigration Movements and Black Mobility
- Gender and the Free Labor Vision
- Religion and Southern Laborers
- Dockworkers, Port Cities and Black Mobilization
- Race Leadership after ‘Redemption’
- Populism and the Color Line
- Agricultural and Urban Labor
- Race, Labor and New South Industrialization
- Independent Politics after 1880
Details are available online at www.afterslavery.com. Proposals (limit 200
words/paper) should be submitted by November 20, 2009 either electronically to charlestonconference@afterslavery.com or by completing the online form at the
After Slavery website.
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)
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
