Social history was flourishing among our faculty, especially with scholars of the civil-rights and women’s movements - like William Chafe, Raymond Gavins, Lawrence Goodwyn, and Nancy Hewitt - and the department was strong in the history of colonial slavery and race in the Americas, with David Barry Gaspar (my primary adviser), Julius Scott, Peter Wood, John Jay Tepaske, and John French.Īmong many of the Black students who studied at Duke in those years, there was profound dialogue about a long Black freedom struggle stretching from the slave trade through the 1960s.

Instead of having to advocate for the viability of research focused on Black history, we could have deeper and less-remedial conversations about the topics that interested us.

The history department had several consecutive years in which more than one or two Black people were in the cohort. Jacqueline Looney - now senior associate dean for graduate programs and associate vice provost for academic diversity - had been tasked with increasing the representation of Black students across the campus. He agreed to share his thoughts about academic writing and scholarship for the Scholars Talk Writing series.Ĭan you talk about your graduate-school experience?īrown: I was really fortunate to arrive at Duke in the 1990s. Marjoleine Kars, an associate professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, showed us all the cover of her new book on a 1763-64 slave rebellion, Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast.Īnd at an after-party, I met Vincent Brown, a chaired professor of American history and of African and African-American studies at Harvard University, whose new book, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, had just received a rave review in The New Yorker. Claudio Saunt, a historian at the University of Georgia, had a hot-off-the-press copy of his Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory. That gathering brought together a mix of historians whose new books couldn’t have been better timed for this moment in American life, when readers are looking for insight into current struggles.

In this continuing series, Rachel Toor interviews scholars about their writing process and influences.

Tacky’s Revolt by Vincent Brown