Haystack Book Festival: “Freedom in Black and White” with Tyler Stovall and Manisha Sinha
Date: 10/02/2021
Time: 10:00 am-11:00 am
Haystack Book Festival presents Tyler Stovall, author of White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea, in conversation with Manisha Sinha, author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition.
To accommodate varying audiences, there are three ways to attend this event:
- Live in-person @ the Norfolk Library* with 60 seats available
- In-person but live-streamed on the Norfolk Hub’s* large screen with 25 seats available
- Virtually live-streamed to watch from home.
*Proof of vaccination and masks required to attend in-person.
To register for your preferred viewing mode for this event, click HERE.
Tyler Stovall is the Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Fordham University. The era of the Enlightenment, which gave rise to our modern conceptions of freedom and democracy, was also the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. America, a nation founded on the principle of liberty, is also a nation built on African slavery, Native American genocide, and systematic racial discrimination. White Freedom traces the racist legacy behind the Western idea of freedom and the complex relationship between freedom and race from the eighteenth century to today, revealing how being free has meant being white. Praise for White Freedom: “White Freedom is clear and engaging. It offers fresh insight to the idea of liberty ― an idea that is increasingly at the fore of societal concern. Stovall doesn’t preach; he doesn’t try to convince anyone to come to his side. He offers important context to the history of the development of freedom, and engaging analysis supported by carefully researched evidence. Stovall, gives us all the information we need, and then challenges us to look deeper.”—Brock Kingsley, Chicago Review of Books “Beautifully written and lucidly argued, Tyler Stovall’s White Freedom effectively disentangles the idea of freedom from the grip of racialized thinking. Ranging widely across history and geography, Stovall takes the ‘white Goddess’ of liberty down from her pedestal, with force, erudition, and elegance.”―Christopher L. Miller, Yale University
Manisha Sinha is Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and several others. The Slave’s Cause is a groundbreaking history of abolition that recovers the largely forgotten role of African Americans in the long march toward emancipation, from the American Revolution through the Civil War. It was long-listed for the 2016 National Book Awards in Nonfiction and was the winner of the 2017 Best Book Prize by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. Praise for The Slave’s Cause: “A powerfully unfamiliar look at the struggle to end slavery in the United States. . . . The Slave’s Cause is as multifaceted as the movement it chronicles.”—Matthew Price, Boston Globe “A stunning new history of abolitionism. . . . Placing abolitionism in its international context is just one of the great strengths of The Slave’s Cause. . . . [Sinha] plugs abolitionism back into the history of anti- capitalist protest.”—Adam Rothman, Atlantic