Book Club for Educators: Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation, David Blight

o    This collection of eleven original essays interrogates the concept of freedom and recenters our understanding of the process of emancipation. Who defined freedom, and what did freedom mean to nineteenth-century African Americans, both during and after slavery? Did freedom just mean the absence of constraint and a widening of personal choice, or did it extend to the ballot box, to education, to equality of opportunity? In examining such questions, rather than defining every aspect of postemancipation life as a new form of freedom, these essays develop the work of scholars who are looking at how belonging to an empowered government or community defines the outcome of emancipation.
o    Some essays in this collection disrupt the traditional story and time-frame of emancipation. Others offer trenchant renderings of emancipation, with new interpretations of the language and politics of democracy. Still others sidestep academic conventions to speak personally about the politics of emancipation historiography, reconsidering how historians have used source material for understanding subjects such as violence and the suffering of refugee women and children. Together the essays show that the question of freedom—its contested meanings, its social relations, and its beneficiaries—remains central to understanding the complex historical process known as emancipation.
o    Please join the ALPLM’s Education and Research teams in this exciting virtual Book Club for Educators, a program that invites you to come as you are, drink what you want, and chat about great books with your peers. This virtual event is free, but registration is required. All participants who read Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation and attend the discussion will receive 6.5 CPDUs. 
 

This is a free program, but advance registration is required.