Our guest is Edward Baptist, a professor at Cornell University, who will soon give the 2017 Cadenhead-Settle Memorial Lecture here at TU. (This free-to-the-public event happens on Monday the 6th, beginning at 7pm; you'll find more information here.) Prof. Baptist will present a talk entitled, "Creating White Freedom by Hunting Enslaved Africans." It's based on an in-depth, NEH-supported research project that he's involved with, i.e., a crowd-sourced analysis of almost 200,000 runaway-slave ads that were published in North American newspapers for several decades. Prof. Baptist argues that 17th- and 18th-century colonial settlers in America made runaway-slave laws in order to both create a stronger system of slavery and maintain a common identity for white people. Also, he's author of "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism" and "Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier Before the Civil War."
A Chat with Prof. Edward Baptist of Cornell University, Who Will Soon Speak Here at TU
