Summer Institute to Reconstruct South Carolina’s “Black Archive”

From an article in the Clemson University web site:

Next summer, faculty from Clemson University and Furman University will lead an effort to reconstruct Black history in South Carolina with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

Clemson English professors Susanna Ashton and Rhondda Thomas will join Furman faculty members Gregg Hecimovich and Kaniqua Robinson to lead a summer institute entitled “Reconstructing the Black Archive: South Carolina as Case Study, 1739–1895.” The three-week residential institute is designed for more than 20 higher education faculty to study ways of reconstructing Black histories, using South Carolina as a case study. The institute is supported by a $198,317 grant from the NEH.

“The Black archive demands new ways of looking,” Ashton said. “If we look at census data, if we look at property records, if we look at court records—are there new questions we can ask of this material, perhaps in ways that push the boundaries of historical investigation?”

“The Black archive is a diverse collection of documents, artifacts, materials that document the Black experience and the African diaspora,” Thomas said. “So that would include everything from slave narratives to inventories of enslaved people to personal letters, journals, newspaper articles, photographs or artifacts that help to tell the story of Black people.”

You can read the full article at: https://bit.ly/3RkdPY9.