Using ground-penetrating radar — provided by Cynthia Ebinger, Tulane professor of earth and environmental sciences and holder of the Marshall-Heape Chair in Geology — Gadison surveyed a site in Thibodaux where a sugarcane labor strike was halted on Nov. 23, 1887. White vigilantes had rounded up striking African-American workers, killing many of them. See the complete article here

Please join us for the upcoming lecture by Dr. Aisha Finch, Associate Professor of Gender Studies & Afro-American Studies at UCLA. Dr. Finch will speak on “Black Magic: Sacred Worlds, Embodied Pleasures, and the Practice of Freedom on the Cuban Plantation” on May 17 at 5 p.m. in Humanities Gateway (HG) 1010.

Dr. Finch is the author of Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-1844 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), and winner, of the Harriet Tubman Book Prize, Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 2016.

In 1931, Zora Neale Hurston sought to publish the story of Cudjo Lewis, the final slave-ship survivor. Instead it languished in a vault. Until now. See the full article, based on Oral History of Africans in America and African Americans, here in this link.

Midterm exam is this Friday, May 4. Materials for the midterm (IDs, images, and extracts) are from week 1 to week 4.

Thus, what we will be working this week 5 (Monday, April 30 and Wed. May 2) will go for the final exam.

Final exam is scheduled, Monday, June 11, 8-10am.

A charter school network has apologized for an assignment asking students to list the positive and negative aspects of slavery, calling the worksheet a “clear mistake.” “To be clear, there is no debate about slavery,” Aaron Kindel, superintendent of Great Hearts Texas, said in a statement posted on Facebook Thursday. “It is immoral and a crime against humanity.” See the entire article here in this link.

Here you see some of the multiple uses of cowries to decorate ritual helmets, knives, and manacles. For a whole article on the fishing of these cowries in the Maldive Islands (African Indian Ocean, follow the link: A supply side aspect of the African slave trade The cowrie production and exports of the Maldives

Forgotten Fields documents the agricultural, economic, and social development of inland rice plantations in the South Carolina Lowcountry, from the inception of this agricultural system at the turn of the eighteenth century to the decline of inland rice in the mid-nineteenth century. See this great educational resource here.

Attend this lecture and get one point of extra credit in your midterm