Second Annual Monroe Fordham Lecture Scheduled
Milton Sernett, professor of African American studies and history and adjunct professor of religion at Syracuse University, will deliver the second annual Monroe Fordham Lecture, North Star Country: Upstate New York and the Crusade for African American Freedom, on Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2003, at 7 p.m. in the Burchfield-Penney Gallery at Rockwell Hall on the Buffalo State College campus.
The lecture and slide presentation is based on his book, North Star Country, which describes the transformation of upstate New Yorks Burned Over District, where widespread religious revivalism sparked an abolitionist movement that eventually erupted into the Civil War.
Sernetts lecture details the regional presence of African Americans, both as champions of liberty and as beneficiaries of a humanitarian spirit, from the pre-Revolutionary War era through the Civil War. He covers the struggles of great abolitionists including Harrriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, Beriah Green, Jermain Loguen and Samuel May who rescued fugitives from slave hunters and maintained safe houses along the Underground Railroad.
Sernetts lecture concludes with a compelling examination of the moral choices made by upstate New Yorkers black and white during the Civil War and of the post-Appomattox campaign to secure freedom for the newly emancipated.
Sernett was a research fellow at the W. E. B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University and a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universit?t Verlin. He is at work on his next book, Harriet Tubman and the American Memory: The Forging of an American Icon.
A book signing will follow the lecture, which is sponsored by Russ Maxwell and the Monroe Fordham Regional History Center Civic Advisory Board, the Afro-American Historical Association of the Niagara Frontier, the Monroe Fordham Regional History Center, the Buffalo State College History and Social Studies Education Department and Buffalo State College.
The lecture and slide presentation is based on his book, North Star Country, which describes the transformation of upstate New Yorks Burned Over District, where widespread religious revivalism sparked an abolitionist movement that eventually erupted into the Civil War.
Sernetts lecture details the regional presence of African Americans, both as champions of liberty and as beneficiaries of a humanitarian spirit, from the pre-Revolutionary War era through the Civil War. He covers the struggles of great abolitionists including Harrriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, Beriah Green, Jermain Loguen and Samuel May who rescued fugitives from slave hunters and maintained safe houses along the Underground Railroad.
Sernetts lecture concludes with a compelling examination of the moral choices made by upstate New Yorkers black and white during the Civil War and of the post-Appomattox campaign to secure freedom for the newly emancipated.
Sernett was a research fellow at the W. E. B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University and a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universit?t Verlin. He is at work on his next book, Harriet Tubman and the American Memory: The Forging of an American Icon.
A book signing will follow the lecture, which is sponsored by Russ Maxwell and the Monroe Fordham Regional History Center Civic Advisory Board, the Afro-American Historical Association of the Niagara Frontier, the Monroe Fordham Regional History Center, the Buffalo State College History and Social Studies Education Department and Buffalo State College.
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