Join us for the December instalment of Ben’s Book Club, a monthly virtual gathering looking at themes relating to Benjamin Franklin, the 18th century, and American history.

Karen Cook-Bell, Associate Professor of History at Bowie State University, will discuss her book, Running from Bondage, recounting the important stories of enslaved women, who comprised one-third of all runaways, and the ways in which they fled, or attempted to flee, bondage during and after the Revolutionary War.   

Karen Cook Bell’s enlightening and original contribution to the study of slave resistance in eighteenth-century America explores the individual and collective lives of these women and girls of diverse circumstances, while also providing details about what led them to escape. She demonstrates that there were in fact two wars being waged during the Revolutionary Era: a political revolution for independence from Great Britain and a social revolution for emancipation and equality in which Black women played an active role. Running from Bondage broadens and complicates how we study and teach this momentous event, one that emphasizes the chances taken by these ‘Black founding mothers’ and the important contributions they made to the cause of liberty.

Karen Cook Bell is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History and Government Department at Bowie State University. Her areas of specialization include slavery and the slave trade, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and women’s history. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of African American History; Georgia Historical Quarterly; Passport; Black Perspectives; U.S. West-Africa: Interaction and Relations (2008); Before Obama: A Reappraisal of Black Reconstruction Era (2012); Converging Identities: Blackness in the Contemporary Diaspora (2013); and Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (2014).  Her writings have also appeared in The Washington Post, History News Network, and Ms. Magazine. She is the author of Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship,  and Land in Nineteenth Century Georgia (University of South Carolina Press, 2018), which won the Georgia Board of Regents Excellence in Research Award; and Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America (Cambridge University Press, 2021).  She is a former AAUW Dissertation Fellow.

You can 0rder a hardcopy or e-book here (UK) or here (US).

Watch the full talk below:

Monday 8 November 2020, 5pm GMT/12pm ET. Register here.  

Our annual Robert H Smith Lecture in American Democracy will once again be held in partnership with the LSE Department of Government. This year, the lecture will be on the theme of “Is American Democracy Under Threat?” with journalist Justin Webb. 

Justin Webb was a roving foreign correspondent for the BBC for many years reporting from wars in the Gulf and Bosnia, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of Apartheid in South Africa. He was Europe Correspondent when the Euro was introduced before moving the US where he became the first BBC North America Editor. He was based in Washington DC from 2002 to 2009 before returning to present the Today Programme on Radio Four. He is a regular writer on US affairs for the Times and the Unherd website. He was educated at the LSE, graduating with a BSc (Econ) in 1983.

Daily panel discussions: Monday 9 – Friday 13 August, 5pm BST/12pm ET.

Keynote panel: Wednesday 11 August, 7pm BST/2pm ET.

Free registration here.

The Transatlantic Slavery Symposium is a joint venture between the Robert H. Smith Scholarship Centre at Benjamin Franklin House in London, the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, and the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Our aim is to bring together scholars from both sides of the Atlantic to address the lasting impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade through panel discussions on themes ranging from its historical foundations and development in the Revolutionary Atlantic world to current best practices in the museums and heritage sector. We hope that by addressing this complex topic from a historical and contemporary perspective, that we can spark further discussions on how to bring stories of enslaved people to the forefront of public history internationally.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, scientific demonstrations, sponsored by Benjamin Franklin, the Midlands-based Lunar Society, and others, were popular entertainments that said as much about social order as they did about science and technology. Depicted in paintings and popular prints, the social message of these demonstrations was elevated even more. Visual references created witty social commentary, and invited a variety of audiences to find relevance in the artworks. In this talk, Prof. Louise Siddons will take a close look at mezzotints by Valentine Green after Joseph Wright and others, asking how changing audiences affected the interpretation of the imagery in his prints.

Dr. Siddons is Professor in Art History at Oklahoma State University whose research interests focus on the history of printmaking and photography, particularly in relation to representations of race, racialization, gender and sexuality. Her Fulbright award supports the completion of her book manuscript which will examine American photographer Laura Gilpin’s 1968 book, “The Enduring Navaho.” Siddons will examine her position within the intersectional politics of twentieth-century photography, Indigeneity and queerness, as well as discuss the propositions Gilpin made for both queer and Native self-determination and sovereignty through the book’s visuals.

Watch the full talk below:

During the final years of the American Revolution, the Royal Navy tried to impress a formerly enslaved man named James Graham into military service. Graham’s legal battle to avoid conscription made its way to the Court of Session, Scotland’s supreme civil court, where the judges had to decide whether or not Graham’s past life as an enslaved mariner could be used to justify service as a free man to king and country.

In this talk, Dr. James P. Ambuske, Digital History at George Washington’s Mount Vernon and co-director of the Scottish Court of Session Digital Archive Project at the University of Virginia Law Library, will discuss Graham’s journey from slavery to freedom and the questions that his case raised in an increasingly complicated revolutionary world.