Park Presents Open to the Public Civil War Lectures

From the educators at Park University: 

   Park University’s Spencer Cave Black History Month Lecture Series will host Chandra M. Manning, Ph.D., as its honored lecturer in the 11th annual installment of the program on Tuesday, Feb. 28. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be held in the McCoy Meetin’ House on the University’s Parkville Campus, beginning at 7 p.m. Manning will present her lecture on the topic “Contraband Camps: Slaves, Union Soldiers and the Uncertain Beginnings of Freedom.”

   “The complicated question of ‘contraband’ as a person verses other property was a highly charged dilemma for President Abraham Lincoln and the Union Army,” said Timothy Westcott, Ph.D., associate professor of history and chair of Park’s Department of History and Political Science.

   Manning, an associate professor of history at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., teaches 19th century U.S. history and co-directs the Georgetown Workshop in 19th Century U.S. History. Her first book, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery and the Civil War (2007), won the Avery Craven Prize awarded by the Organization of American Historians; earned honorable mention honors for the Lincoln Prize, the Jefferson Davis Prize and the Virginia Literary Awards for Non-Fiction; and was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize. Currently, she is working on a book about Civil War contraband camps, freed people’s post-Civil War migration and the struggle over the meaning of citizenship in the 19th century United States.

   Manning researches and writes about 19th century U.S. history with a focus on the growing sectional tensions of the antebellum period, the Civil War and Reconstruction. She is particularly interested in ordinary Americans’ ideas about slavery, civil rights, citizenship, Republicanism and the legacy of the American Revolution. Her published work to date has focused largely on Union and Confederate soldiers’ changing attitudes toward slavery and race during the Civil War. Her new work will take up questions of white northern soldiers’ and civilians’ notions of, and attitudes toward, racial equality and black rights during and after the Civil War, as well as freed slaves’ ideas about freedom and citizenship. She is also interested in how Americans’ cultural attitudes and values responded to and shaped the U.S. transition in the 19th century from an agrarian republic to an urban, industrial nation.

   Manning earned her Ph.D. in history in 2002 from Harvard University and her Master of Philosophy degree in Irish history and literature in 1995 from University College,Galway, Ireland. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history, graduating summa cum laude in 1993 from Mount Holyoke College.

   The Spencer Cave Black History Lecture Series is named for Spencer Cave, who was born a slave at the start of the Civil War, later moved to Parkville in 1875 and worked for Park University for more than 70 years. He died in 1947. The series is co-sponsored by Park’s Zeta Omicron chapter of Phi Alpha Theta and the Organization of American Historians.

   For more information about the event, contact Westcott at tim.westcott@park.edu or(816) 584-6364, or visit www.park.edu/blackhistory.

Please note: McCoy Meetin’ House has restricted physical access. Park University wants to make available to everyone access to all programs and activities conducted in this building. Requests for physical access accommodations should be addressed in a timely manner to Park University’s director of public safety at(816) 584-6226. Park University will make all reasonable modifications to ensure that individuals with physical challenges have an equal opportunity to enjoy all programs and activities.