"Black History's Warning to the World"

The past several years have witnessed transatlantic efforts to deny and disparage Black perspectives on our common history. This is a denial of our right to critically analyze all of our history from points of view that emerge from a history of enslavement, impoverishment, and racial violence, and that question the customary disavowal that these things constitute fundamental features of the Atlantic experience. Reframing narratives of the Age of Revolution, this lecture highlights the ways in which Black history is world history, and as such it has lessons - and warnings - for the world.

Vincent Brown is the Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He has published two prize-winning books about the history of slavery: The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (2008) and Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (2020). The author of numerous articles and reviews in scholarly journals, he is also Principal Investigator and Curator for the animated thematic map Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative (2013), he was Producer and Director of Research for the award-wining television documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (2009), broadcast nationally on season 11 of the PBS series Independent Lens, and he is the executive producer and host for The Bigger Picture, co-produced with WNET for PBS Digital. His company Timestamp Media explores the history that connects people and places across the world. 

Reception to follow