On Thursday, October 30, 2014, the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World program continued the Wells Fargo Distinguished Public Lecture Series with a lecture by Dr. Tristan Stubbs.  For his lecture Stubbs presented part of his research on the plantation overseers of eighteenth-century Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina.  He described how the nineteenth-century view of overseers as capricious and brutal men can be traced back to the eighteenth century.  Stubbs noted that attitudes towards overseers had not always been so harsh, and he argued that the idea of overseers as both brutal and often incompetent arose in the eighteenth century due to a number of factors, including a rising absenteeism among plantation owners and strains of Enlightenment thought.  Stubbs, who received his PhD from Pembroke College, Cambridge, is quite the expert on the overseers of the eighteenth century, his manuscript on the subject having won the 2013 Hines Prize.  The lecture had the honor of being attended by Dr. Sam Hines, who led the creation of the CLAW program and is the man behind the Hines Prize, named after Dr. Hines’ mother.  Right before the lecture Dr. Hines presented Dr. Stubbs with a certificate confirming him as the 2013 Hines Prize winner. The Wells Fargo Distinguished Public Lecture series will continue on November 6^th at 6 pm with a lecture given in the College of Charleston’s Jewish Studies Center by Dr. Ras Michael Brown, a professor from Southern Illinois University.