You are invited to join Producer and Editor Elisabeth Haviland James, the ACLU of SC, and the Avery Research Center for a special screening of The Loving Story.  This film recounts the story of the Lovings, Mildred (who was part black and part Native American) and Richard (who was white), whose marriage was declared illegal in their home state of Virginia.  The Lovings refused to leave one another or their home.  This film recreates a seminal moment in history and reflects a timely message of marriage equality in a personal, human love story.

Thursday, July 26, 2012
5:30pm Reception
6:00pm Screening

College of Charleston
Avery Research Center
125 Bull Street

Download the Flier here

Politics, Plantations and Camels: early publishing about Barbados

Check out the British Library’s Americas Collection blog!  They’ve got a fun little sneak peek into they’re Barbados collection here.

Tags: Barbados, British Library

You are invited to the Carifest Symposium, held on June 14th from 6-9 pm at the Avery Research Center on 125 Bull Street. Reception starts at 5:30 pm.

Tags: Avery Research Center, Carifest

Race, Gender & Sexualities in the Atlantic

The Program in the Carolina Lowcountry & Atlantic World 2012 Conference

For more information: http://prosper.cofc.edu/~atlantic/gender/

The Charleston Historical Society will co-sponsor its next lecture at the Karpeles Manuscript Museum at 68 Spring Street on Thursday, March 15, 2012, at 7:00 PM. The lecture, entitled, ” Charleston and Its Irish: Celebrations in the 1890s” will be presented by Stephen J. White, Sr.  It relies on some of his recent research and writings on one of the most vibrant periods of Irish Charlestonians in the late 19th Century. The lecture is free and open to the public.
White has sorted through three decades of records and articles in The News and Courier as in the early years of The Evening Post. In them he has found a vast store of rich accounts of an extraordinary range of public, philanthropic and social activities among close to a dozen Irish societies, clubs, militias, and civic organizations. The major focus in this talk will be how they led all of Charleston in its annual, colorful observances of St. Patrick’s Day. This presentation is part of our current, annual St. Patrick’s Week celebrations.
Stephen Jennings White, Sr. is a native of Charleston whose Irish ancestors emigrated from their homeland to the Holy City five generations past. He attended Cathedral Grammar School on Queen Street and graduated from Bishop England High School in 1971. He earned his BA degree in history and philosophy from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 1975. He taught history at the Archibald Rutledge Academy in McClellanville and at Bishop England before entering graduate studies. In 1981 he completed a MA degree in Early America History at the University of Virginia, and then completed all requirements for a PhD except for the dissertation (ABD). In 1995 he received a Masters in Public administration from the College of Charleston/University of South Carolina joint program.
White has taught at the University of Virginia, St. Andrews Academy in Boca Raton, Florida, the College of Charleston, The Citadel, and Trident Technical College locally. He also worked in the Admissions Office and the Office of Academic Advising at the College of Charleston for a half dozen years. In 1999 he founded, and has since served as the Director of, the Charleston Historical Society, and since 2007 he has served as the Executive Director at the Karpeles Manuscript Museum.
White is married to the former Christine Westcott Stewart of Charlottesville, Virginia and they have raised five children on Smith Street in Harleston Village, on the Charleston peninsula.
For more information about this lecture and all future lectures, call Stephen White at the Charleston Historical Society at (843) 723-3398, or at the Karpeles Museum at (843) 853-4651.

Congratulations to our friends at Lowcountry Africana for the their new website.  It is an incredible resource for genealogists, historians, or anyone interested in African American heritage in the region.  Please visit the site by clicking here.  And make sure to check out the new on-line research library.

On March 9-11, 2012 the Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW) at the College of Charleston will host an international conference addressing women, gender, and sexuality in the Atlantic World 1500-Present. The featured keynote speaker is Jennifer L. Morgan (New York University).  Conference registration is now open.  For registration information or for a full conference schedule, please visit the conference homepage.

The Avery Research Center is excited to host “Word, Shout, Song: Lorenzo Dow Turner Connecting Communities through Language”, the world-class exhibition developed by the Smithsonian Institution’s Anacostia Community Museum, in January 2012. This exhibition is a beautiful and thought-provoking assemblage of artifacts, photographs, and text that documents the life and work of Dr. Lorenzo Dow Turner, whom many scholars consider as the first African-American linguist and the Father of Gullah Studies. It also examines the visceral interconnections between African diasporan cultures on three continents: the Gullah-Geechee communities of South Carolina and Georgia; the Afro-Brazilian community of Bahia, Brazil; and the West African cultures from which the other two were born.
The Turner family had been free for four generations by the time Dow Turner was born in 1890, which helped him pursue a stellar education that included an undergraduate degree from Harvard College and a Ph.D from the University of Chicago. His studies eventually led him to the South Carolina Lowcountry and his introduction to the Gullah language. He immediately began to see similarities between it and various African languages. Turner’s curiosity of a language that sounded much like English, yet was without formal academic study, led him to twenty years of research on the language and its people, including many sojourns to West Africa to expand his research.
Before Dow Turner’s research, the Gullah language was unclassified, unstudied, and considered informal gibberish. Using an inquisitive ear, Turner was able to eventually link Portuguese and English words to their myriad of African roots within Gullah, and “Word, Shout, Song” visually and audibly explains this in a magnificent exhibition
Although born on American soil and free at the time of Dow Turner’s studies, the speakers had retained the past of their enslaved ancestors and beyond to their African heritages. In that vein, the Gullah language is a syncretic fusion of the African, American, and European ties that weave through the speakers’ legacies.
Dow Turner’s research helped bridge the gap between the descendants of the enslaved people on the Lowcountry Sea Islands to the descendants of the enslaved people on the mainland—linguistically as well as culturally. The exhibit chronicles all of the research, trips, recordings, and findings through aural and visual means. To have an exhibit not only of this importance, but also of this stature, come to the College of Charleston is an honor and a landmark.
Various generous donations to the Avery Research Center have made this exhibition possible, including the Office of the President at the College of Charleston, MUSC, the MeadWestvaco Community Development and Land Management Group, the City of Charleston, the Charleston Convention and Visitors Bureau, and the National Park Service.

Peter H. Wood has inspired a generation of historians to investigate the role played by people of African descent in the construction of American society.  His first book, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974), is both an essential history of South Carolina’s turbulent beginnings and a classic portrait of how a human community shapes its environment and is shaped by land and water in turn.  His subsequent work reflects his lifelong interests in exploration, natural history, and the arts.  Wood’s two recent books on paintings by Winslow Homer—Weathering the Storm:  Inside Winslow Homer’s Gulf Stream (2004) and Near Andersonville: Winslow Homer’s Civil War (2010)—break new ground in the interpretation of an American master.

On October 20–21, the College of Charleston’s Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World program, Addlestone Library, and Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture will present “The Art of History,” a two-day event honoring Peter Wood.  Activities will begin on Thursday evening at 6:00 in Addlestone Library, room 227, with a screening of Carvalho’s Journey, a work-in-progress by acclaimed filmmaker Steve Rivo.  Born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1815, Solomon Nunes Carvalho was an observant Jew who became a mainstream artist and the official photographer for John C. Fremont’s 1853 expedition across North America, a journey that nearly cost him his life.

On Friday, Wood, professor emeritus at Duke University, will offer a lecture on Near Andersonville, recounting the detective-like work at the intersection of art and history that led him to uncover the mysteries of this once neglected painting.  Winslow Homer may be best known for his paintings of ships and sailors, hunters and fishermen, rural vignettes and coastal scenes, but he also created some of the first serious black figures in American art.  Wood’s provocative study gives us a fresh view on Homer’s early career, the struggle to end slavery, and the dramatic closing engagements of the Civil War.

The lecture, to be held on October 21^st at 6:00 PM at the Avery Research Center, 125 Bull Street, is co-sponsored by Wells Fargo (formerly Wachovia) Bank and is a part of the CLAW program’s commemoration of the Civil War sesquicentennial.

Peter H. Wood reviews Peter McCandless’s Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) in Southern Spaces.

In a few days, well before the first mosquito-killing frost reaches the South Carolina Lowcountry, I’ll head to Charleston for a conference. I look forward to the visit, and I expect to return home in good health. As medical historian Peter McCandless comments reassuringly about the region, “It is now, as it once was, a relatively healthy place.”

For more on this story visit http://www.southernspaces.org/2011/putting-hospital-southern-hospitality

Tags: health, regional studies