Rice to host 3-day symposium on slavery in Colonial South

CONTACT: Franz Brotzen
PHONE: 713-348-6775
E-MAIL: franz.brotzen@rice.edu  

Rice to host 3-day symposium on slavery in Colonial South
Lectures to cover enslavement of Native Americans, Africans

A free public symposium at Rice University will feature seven historians lecturing on the enslavement of Native Americans and Africans between 1500 and 1800 in what would become the Southern United States.

The symposium, “Slavery in the Colonial South,” will be held Feb. 18-20 in the Farnsworth Pavilion at the Ley Student Center on the Rice University campus, 6100 Main St. For directions, go to http://www.rice.edu/maps/maps.html.

Alan Gallay, the Warner R. Woodring Chair in Atlantic World and Early American History and chair of history at Ohio State University, will open the event Friday at 7 p.m. with a lecture titled “Indian Slavery, African Slavery: The American Colonial South in Regional, Atlantic and Global Contexts.” A reception will follow.

Saturday’s topics range from the enslavement of American Indians in the 17th-century Spanish Southwest to the plight of the Chickasaws.

The symposium ends Sunday with “Legacies of Colonial Slavery” by James Sidbury, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

The symposium is a biennial event hosted by Rice’s History Department and the Journal of Southern History.

“Previous symposia have covered topics such as the global South in the era of the Civil War, Thomas Jefferson and the post-war U.S. South,” said Rebecca Goetz, assistant professor of history, who is organizing the event. “The object is to bring a wide variety of scholars working on a particular topic to campus to give talks and to interact with our students.” Goetz said she hopes the essays resulting from the symposium will be published.

For more information, go to http://www.rice.edu/southernhistory/index.html.

Members of the news media who want to attend any of the workshops should RSVP to Franz Brotzen at franz.brotzen@rice.edu or 713-348-6775.