Slavery and Freedom at UVA and in Central Virginia:  History and Legacies

This course examines the history of slavery and its legacy at UVA and in the central Virginia region.  The course aims to recover the experiences of enslaved individuals and their roles in building and maintaining the university, and to contextualize those experiences within Southern history.  The course is thus an exploration of slave and free black communities, culture and resistance, and an examination of the development of the University of Virginia.  We will put the history of slavery in the region into political context, tracing the rise of sectional tensions and secession, the advent of emancipation, the progress of Reconstruction, and the imposition of Jim Crow.

The course is interdisciplinary in nature, as we will draw on a wide range of fields, such as art history, architecture, and archaeology.  A major focus will be on how we know what we know:  on what archives and other repositories of historical sources hold; on how they were constructed; on what they leave out or obscure; and how scholars overcome the gaps, distortions and silences in the historical record.

The last weeks of the course will focus on 20^th century UVA and Charlottesville, and on the issues of segregation and integration, reconciliation and repair; we will connect current initiatives at UVA to represent the history of slavery with initiatives at other universities.