For all the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World people in the Northeast US, the Gilder Lehrman Center will hold its 16th Annual International Conference at the Yale Center for British Art (1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT) on November 7-8, 2014.  The two-day conference is meant to coincide with the Center for British Art’s exhibition Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain, and conference will help place these pieces in historical contexts and explore the relationship between slavery and British art and culture. For those in the area (and those elsewhere) who are interested, here is the link to the conference homepage: http://www.yale.edu/glc/visualizing-slavery/index.htm.

The CLAW program is pleased to announce the publication of David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis’s new book, The Civil War as Global Conflict: Transnational Meanings of the American Civil War. This edited volume developed from CLAW’s  “Civil War—Global Conflict” conference, which was held at the College of Charleston in March 2011 as part of the sesquicentennial commemoration of the Civil War. It is the twentieth publication in the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World book series with the University of South Carolina Press.

The Civil War as Global Conflict attempts to expand the insular national and regional narratives that have shaped much of the popular and scholarly discussions of the history of the US Civil War. As Gary W. Gallagher, Nau Professor of History at the University of Virginia and author of The Union War says, “The essays in this welcome volume place aspects of the Civil War within a spacious world context. Taking up topics that address economics, diplomacy, ethnicity, politics, gender, race, and memory, they remind us that the greatest military event in American history reverberated far beyond the shores of the United States and the Confederacy.”

Highly distinguished Civil War scholars such as James M. McPherson and Aaron Sheehan-Dean examine the struggles over slavery and sovereignty in the United States in the context of other conflicts and political developments elsewhere in the western hemisphere. Although the Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in US history, and one of the nation’s most defining events, this volume underscores that the war was by no means the only conflict that ensnared global imperial powers in the mid-nineteenth century. In some ways the Civil War was just another element in contemporary conflicts over the definitions of liberty, democracy, and nationhood occurring throughout the world.

The volume’s twelve individual essays address numerous provocative themes covering a wide array of topics, ranging from discussions of the legality of retaliation in the war, through cultural and diplomatic history, to analyses of the significance of Florence Nightingale in Civil War and post-Civil War nursing practices. The book concludes with a coda in which noted local, national, and international historians reflect on how we remember the war—what we remember and what we forget—and the reasons why we should remember the war. While we now take for granted the nation’s values of freedom and democracy, we cannot understand the impact of the Civil War and the victorious “new birth of freedom” without considering the global influences and impacts of this event

Brian Schoen, associate professor of history and director of Undergraduate Studies at Ohio University describes the volume as “highly original in conceptualization and execution” and likely to revise our understanding of the war, the broader context within which it was fought, and especially its meaning across time and space.”

A native of Ireland, David T. Gleeson is a professor of American history at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne and a former director of the College of Charleston’s Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World program. He is the editor of The Irish in the Atlantic World, co-editor of Ambiguous Anniversary: The Bicentennial of the International Slave Trade Bans, and author of The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America.

Simon Lewis is a professor of world literature at the College of Charleston, where he is also an associate director of the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World program. Lewis is the author of White Women Writers and Their African Invention and British and African Literature in Transnational Context. He is also the co-editor of Ambiguous Anniversary: The Bicentennial of the International Slave Trade Bans.

For additional information on this book and the USC Press’s Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World book series, please visit http://www.sc.edu/uscpress/books/2014/7325.html.

After her visit with Afropop, Kokanko headed south for appearances at the College of Charleston, the University of Georgia, and Furman  and Duke Universities. This tour was organized by Julie Moore, the executive director of the Cradle of Jazz Project, and an adjunct professor of music at Furman.  Moore has studied West African music and dance for 15 years, and in 2010 began uncovering new evidence that the Mande played a critical role in the formation of the cornerstone of black New Orleans culture during the 1700s.

http://www.afropop.org/wp/18113/kokanko-sata-doumba-a-queen-of-wassoulou-music-visits-the-american-south/

The Waring Historical Library at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) announces that its annual Joseph I. Waring Jr. Lecture and annual membership meeting will take place on Thursday, April 10, 2014 at 5:30 pm in the Basic Sciences Building auditorium on the campus of the Medical University of South Carolina.

Dr. Henry Fraser will present his talk, “Pestilence in Paradise: Dr. William Hillary’s Epidemiology in Colonial Barbados.” In 2012, Dr. Fraser and Dr. J. Edward Hutson edited the reissue of Dr. William Hillary’s Observations on the Changes of the Air and the Concomitant Epidemical Diseases in the Island of Barbadoes, first published in 1759 in London.

Dr. Henry Fraser GCM, BSc (Physiology), MBBS, PhD (Pharmacology), FACP, FRCP is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Medical Sciences at the University of the West Indies, Barbados. He was the founding director of the Chronic Disease Research Center at the University of the West Indies and served as dean of the Faculty of Medical Sciences in Barbados from 2001 until his retirement in 2010. He has also been an active writer, artist, public orator, architectural historian and conservationist. His publications include more than one hundred peer-reviewed medical and scientific papers on medical education, drug treatment, epilepsy, hypertension, obesity, stroke and many other subjects. He is also the author of hundreds of articles and newspaper columns, along with several books about Barbados history, heritage, architecture, and culture, including Treasures of Barbados, Illustrious West Indians, and the co-authored Historic Houses of Barbados and A–Z of Barbados Heritage.

A reception will follow at the Wickliffe House. This event is free and open to the public.

For more information, please contact the library at 843-792-2288 or waringhl@musc.edu