2019 McPherson-Mitchell Lecture
Dr. Sylviane Diouf
January 28, 2019
Dr. Sylviane Diouf, in her lecture "The Clotilda, African Town, and Beyond," discusses the 1859 smuggling of enslaved persons from the west coast of Africa to Mobile, Alabama. This was fifty-one years after the African slave trade had been made illegal in the United States, and was the last known slave ship arriving in the United States from Africa. Dr. Diouf tells the story of the voyage, the enslaved people, and their lives after emancipation. This topic became very timely in 2018 when a newspaper reporter thought he had discovered the sunken hull of the Clotilda in the Mobile River.
Dr. Diouf is an independent historian of the African diaspora and author or editor of four non-fiction books, multiple book chapters and articles, and three children's books. The book upon which she based her lecture, Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America (Oxford University Press, 2007) won the 2007 Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association and the 2009 James F. Sulzby Award of the Alabama Historical Association.
Previous Lectures
2018
Dr. Hardy Jackson
Eminent Professor of History Emeritus at Jacksonville State University
"The Rise and Decline of the Redneck Riviera"
2017
Dr. Deidra Suwanee Dees
Director and Tribal Archivist of the Office of Archives and Records Management, Poarch Band of Creek Indians
"Discovering Lost Treasures: The Muscogee Education Movement's Influence on Archival Acquisitions at the Poarch Band of Creek Indians"
2016
Dr. Arlene W. Keeling
PhD, RN, FAAN, University of Virginia, Centennial Distinguished Professor of Nursing and Assistant Director of the Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Historical Nursing Inquiry
“Providing Care in the ‘Hoot Owl Hollers’: The Frontier Nursing Service, 1925-1950”
2015
Dr. James C. Cobb
B. Phinizy Spalding Professor History, University of Georgia
"The South is Where You Find It: Contours of Southern Identity, Old and New"
2014
Dr. Kenneth Noe
Draughon Professor of Southern History, Auburn University
"The Yellowhammer War: Revisiting Alabama's Civil War at the Sesquicentennial"
2013
Dr. Jennifer Garlan
Independent Scholar
"When Hollywood Whistles Dixie: A Celluloid History of the South"
2012
Dr. Raymond O. Arsenault
John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History, University of South Florida
"Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice"
Congressman John Lewis
U.S. Representative
"A Personal Experience The Freedom Rides"
2011
Dr. Paul Sutter
Professor, University of Colorado at Boulder
"Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Making Sense of Georgia's Little Grand Canyon"
2010
Dr. James L. Roark
Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of American History, Emory University
"Why the Confederacy Lost"
2009
Dr. Margaret Humphreys
Josiah Charles Trent Professor of the History of Medicine and Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, Duke University
"The South's Secret Weapons: Disease, Environment, and the Civil War"
2008
Dr. Stephanie Yuhl
Associate Professor of History, College of the Holy Cross
"Memory Matters: Personal and Public Heritage in Charleston"
2007
Dr. Fred Bailey
Professor, Abilene Christian University
"After Populism: Redeemer History and Social Control in New South Alabama, 1890-1920"
2004
Dr. Wayne Flynt
Professor, Auburn University