Episode 5: Aftermath

Season One | Episode 5

Episode Five: Aftermath
Hosted by Dan Gediman. With Anne Marshall, Patrick Lewis, Marion Lucas, Kidada Williams, Vanessa Holden, George Wright, and Brigitt Johnson, and featuring Erin Jones and Keith McGill.

Kentuckians fought on both sides of the Civil War but came together at war’s end to oppose a common foe—newly emancipated African Americans yearning for education, dignity, and a decent living. In the process, the state pioneered restrictive racial laws that became models for the rest of the South. Episode Transcript

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Guests

Anne Marshall

Anne Marshall is an author and associate professor of history at Mississippi State University.

Anne E. Marshall is an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Centre College of Kentucky and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 2004. She has worked at Mississippi State University since 2006, and teaches numerous graduate level courses, as well as undergraduate courses including Jacksonian American (1825-1850); History of the Old South; and the History of Southern Women.

She is the author of Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2010). She has also published numerous journal articles and essays, two of which have won prizes for best article for the year of publication (Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, 2000 and Journal of the Civil War Era, 2011). Marshall has presented numerous papers and commented on panels at conferences including the American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, the Southern Historical Association, and the Society of Civil War Historians. Her current book project looks nineteenth century anti-slavery politics through the life of the colorful Kentucky emancipationist Cassius M. Clay.

Dr. Patrick Lewis

Patrick Lewis is Scholar in Residence at the Filson Historical Society and is co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal, Ohio Valley History.

Patrick Lewis is Scholar in Residence at the Filson Historical Society and is co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal, Ohio Valley History. A Trigg County, Kentucky, native, Lewis graduated from Transylvania University and holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Kentucky. He has worked for the National Park Service and the Kentucky Historical Society, and has won digital history grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Lewis is author of For Slavery and Union: Benjamin Buckner and Kentucky Loyalties in the Civil War (2015). He tweets about public history at @KyPLewis.

Dr. Vanessa M. Holden

Vanessa M. Holden is an assistant professor of History and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky.

Vanessa M. Holden is an assistant professor of History and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Holden’s current book project, tentatively titled, Surviving Southampton: Gender, Community, Resistance and Survival During the Southampton Rebellion of 1831(University of Illinois Press), explores the contributions that African American women and children, free and enslaved, made to the Southampton Rebellion of 1831, also called Nat Turner’s Rebellion.

Dr. Holden’s work and writing has been published in Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, Perspectives on History, Process: A Blog for American History, and The Rumpus. She also blogs for Black Perspectives and The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History.

In addition to her work on enslaved women and slave rebellion, Dr. Holden also co-organizes the Queering Slavery Working Group (#QSWG) with Jessica Marie Johnson (Johns Hopkins University). Her second project, Forming Intimacies: Queer Kinship and Resistance in the Antebellum American Atlantic, will focus on same gender loving individuals and American slavery.

Dr. Holden also serves as a faculty adviser or consultant on a number of public history and digital humanities projects including: Freedom on the Move (a digital archive of runaway slave adds); Black Horsemen of the Kentucky Turf (an exhibit chronicling the intersecting histories of African Americans and the horse industry in Kentucky), and a grant project aimed at bringing a driving tour and museum to Southampton County, Virginia, that interprets the Southampton Rebellion.

Find her on Twitter @drvholden.

Marion Lucas

Marion Lucas is an author and Professor Emeritus at Western Kentucky University.

Marion B. Lucas began teaching at Western Kentucky University in 1966 after receiving a Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina. Lucas teaches the survey courses in U.S. History and Western Civilization Since 1648, advanced classes in The Old South, The Civil War, and Reconstruction and graduate classes in Slavery and The Civil War. Lucas agrees with historian Carl L. Becker’s assertion that everyone interprets the past, regardless of her or his knowledge of events, and therefore prioritizes helping his students become informed historians.

Lucas’s interests reflect his love of nineteenth century American history. After writing a book on the Civil War, Sherman and the Burning of Columbia and A History of Blacks in Kentucky. Vol. I: From Slavery to Segregation 1760-1891, he began researching “A biography of John G. Fee, Kentucky Abolitionist and Educator.” Lucas has also written articles for regional journals, two of which were judged best article of the year, and short articles and biographies for national and regional dictionaries, encyclopedias, magazines, and newspapers. Dr. Lucas currently holds the titles of University Distinguished Professor and Professor of History.

Kidada Williams

Kidada E. Williams is an author and associate professor of History at Wayne State University.

Kidada E. Williams is a historian and author who researches the history of African American survivors of racist violence. She is the author of They Left Great Marks on Me and co-editor of Charleston Syllabus. She is finishing I Saw Death Coming, a book about African American families held captive by the Klan during Reconstruction. She lives, works, and plays in Detroit.

George C. Wright

George C. Wright is an historian, noted author, and distinguished university scholar and senior faculty fellow for Institutional Diversity at the University of Kentucky.

George C. Wright is an historian, noted author, and distinguished university scholar and senior faculty fellow for Institutional Diversity at the University of Kentucky. Wright is involved in special assignments at both the administrative level and in the university’s College of Arts and Sciences.

Wright received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art in 1972 and 1974, respectively, from UK, both in history, and a doctoral degree in history from Duke University. He became the seventh president of Prairie View A&M University in 2003 and served in the role until 2017, when he was named Prairie View A&M University President Emeritus.

A native Kentuckian, Dr. George Wright is the author of “A History of Blacks in Kentucky: In Pursuit of Equality, 1890-1980, Volume II; Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865-1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule and “Legal Lynchings,” and Life Behind a Veil: Blacks in Louisville, Kentucky, 1865-1930.

Episode Bibliography

Learn more about slavery and its lasting effects in America by exploring the source materials referenced in The Reckoning. Our bibliography contains many items that are available to read or download for free. If you choose to purchase any of the books through the links provided, as an Amazon Associate, our non-profit organization Reckoning, Inc. earns commissions from qualifying purchases.

13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery

Forehand, Beverly. Striking Resemblance: Kentucky, Tennessee, Black Codes and Readjustment, 1865-1866. (1996). Masters Theses & Specialist Projects. Paper 868. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/868

Lewis, Patrick. (paid link) For Slavery and Union: Benjamin Buckner and Kentucky Loyalties in the Civil War. University Press of Kentucky, Mar 9, 2015

Lucas, Marion B. (paid link) A History of Blacks in Kentucky: From Slavery to Segregation, 1760-1891. Second ed. Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 2003.

Marrs, Elijah P. (paid link) Life and History of the Rev. Elijah P. Marrs, First Pastor of Beargrass Baptist Church, and Author. Louisville, Kentucky: The Bradley and Gilbert Company, 1885. Electronic Edition part of the UNC-CH digitization project, Documenting the American South. Read for free at Doc South

Marshall, Anne (paid link) Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State. (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2010).

Williams, Kidada E. (paid link) They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I. New York: NYU Press, 2012.

Wright, George C. (paid link) A History of Blacks in Kentucky: In Pursuit of Equality, 1890-1980 (Kentucky Historical Society).

Wright, George C. (paid link) Life Behind a Veil. Blacks in Louisville, Kentucky, 1865-1930 Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985.

Wright, George C. (paid link) Racial Violence in Kentucky 1865-1940 : Lynchings, Mob Rule, and Legal Lynchings.” Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1996.‌

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