WILSON, N.C. — October 11, 2016 — Barton College will welcome historian John David Smith, Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, as the featured speaker for the BB&T Lecture in American History, on Tuesday, Oct. 18. Scheduled for 7 p.m. in The Sam and Marjorie Ragan Writing Center, Dr. Smith’s lecture is titled “‘You turned us loose to the sky . . . to the wrath of our infuriated masters’: Emancipation and Reconstruction Reconsidered.” This program is open to the public free of charge, and the community is invited to attend.
A Brooklyn, New York, native, Smith studied southern and Civil War history with Charles P. Roland at the University of Kentucky and has taught at several universities, including North Carolina State University and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München.
He has published 29 books, including “An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865–1918” (1985), “The Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery” (1988), “Slavery, Race, and American History” (1999), “Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and The American Negro” (2000), “Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era” (2002), “Undaunted Radical: The Selected Writings and Speeches of Albion W. Tourgée” (2010), “Lincoln and the U.S. Colored Troops” (2013), “Soldiering for Freedom” (2014), “We Ask Only for Even-Handed Justice” (2014), and “Interpreting American History: Reconstruction” (forthcoming 2016).
Smith also is the recipient of a number of awards, including the Mayflower Society Award for Nonfiction and The Gustavus Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America.
This lectureship is endowed by BB&T, and the evening’s sponsors include the School of Humanities at Barton College and the Wilson County Historical Association.
For additional information about this program, please contact Dr. Jeff Broadwater, professor of history, at (252) 399-6443 or ojbroadwater@barton.edu.
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