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"Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South" with Dr. Barbara Krauthamer

This third installment in the Department of History's 2013-2014 Virtual Lecture Series will feature Dr. Barbara Krauthamer, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Barbara Krauthamer’s book Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South was published in summer 2013 by the University of North Carolina Press. It is the first full-length study of chattel slavery and the lives of enslaved people in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indian nations. The book reveals the centrality of slavery and racial ideology in Native leaders’ definitions of Indian sovereignty, as well as in U.S. federal policy towards Indian peoples and territory. She has already written a number of articles and book chapters on the subjects of slavery in Indian Territory, and African American/Native American intersections. Her work has been supported with funding from the NEH, Stanford University, Yale University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Professor Krauthamer co-authored Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery with Professor Deborah Willis of New York University. The book features 150 historical photographs of enslaved and free African Americans from the 1850s through the 1930s, and also includes four essays that discuss the photographic representations of slavery, emancipation, and freedom. This book was published by Temple University Press in January 2013, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.

She is currently working on a study of runaway slave women that frames enslaved women as intellectual and political actors and examines the meanings and manifestations of freedom in their lives.