Yale will host a conference exploring the history and consequences of American slavery in the North, Thursday-Saturday, Sept. 26-28.
Titled "Yale, New Haven and American Slavery," the conference was organized by the Law School and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. It is open to the public free of charge.
The conference has two goals. The first is to explore the ways in which American slavery, and the confrontation over it, shaped local experience in New Haven -- particularly how local institutions, such as Yale, responded to developments in the nation at large. The second goal is to examine from moral, legal and religious perspectives the contemporary implications of the history of slavery.
"Every corner of America, North and South, was touched by the institution of slavery," says Anthony Kronman, dean of the Law School. "This conference will explore America's confrontation with slavery through the lens of our local experience, in New Haven and at Yale, and will engage the contemporary meaning of the history we share for the challenges of the present we inhabit."
The conference will bring together noted historians, legal scholars, philosophers and sociologists from Yale, Harvard, Oxford, Johns Hopkins and New York universities, the University of California at Los Angeles and other institutions of higher learning.
David W. Blight, an expert on the Civil War who will join the Yale faculty this spring, will deliver the keynote address at 8 p.m. on Thursday in the Law School's Levinson Auditorium, 127 Wall St. Blight, currently professor of history and African American studies at Amherst College, was the 2002 winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Award for his celebrated new study "Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory." The book explores how the United States achieved a measure of post-Civil War unity by celebrating the valor of white Union and Confederate soldiers and downplaying the destruction of slavery.
Conference sessions will deal with "Slavery and Racism in the Antebellum North," "The Edwardsian Tradition and Post-Revolutionary Yale," "John C. Calhoun and Sectional Politics," "The Amistad Test, Colonization and Abolition," "The Moral Claims of the Past: Justice Across Time" and "Reparations, Reconciliation and Repair: Present Remedies for Past Wrongs."
A full conference schedule is available on line at www.law.yale.edu/outside/html/Centers/cen-sc.htm.
The Gilder Lehrman Center was founded at Yale in 1998 with support from Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman through the Gilder Lehrman Institute in New York City. Headed by David Brion Davis, the Sterling Professor Emeritus of History, the center is a division of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies.
The center is dedicated to the investigation and dissemination of information concerning all aspects of slavery and the Atlantic slave system. Toward this end, the center promotes interaction among scholars engaged in research in these areas and assists in the translation of scholarly information into public knowledge through publications, educational outreach, conferences and other programs.
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