On September 24, 2020, Doc Chat launched its new fall season with a lively conversation about abolitionism and its parallels to today.

An ongoing series from NYPL's Center for Research in the Humanities, Doc Chat pairs a NYPL curator or specialist and a scholar to discuss evocative digitized items from the Library's collections and brainstorm innovative ways of teaching with them. In episode 3, NYPL’s Julie Golia and Bronx Community College Professor and public historian Prithi Kanakamedala discussed one anti-slavery illustration and what it can tell us about the racial politics of abolitionism.

A transcript of this event is available here.

Below are some handy links to materials and sources suggested in the episode. 

Episode Three: Primary Sources

The panelists, along with the episode's attendees, analyzed an illustration called "The friends of humanity laying the axe to the upas tree of slavery, which is ever loaded with the sum of all villainies." The image is from the 1853 collection of pamphlets called Five Hundred Thousand Strokes for Freedom, edited by well-known British abolitionist Wilson Armistead. 

Panelist Prithi Kanakamedala suggests that teachers pair the illustration with the iconic abolitionist image "Am I Not A Man And A Brother" to discuss the forward-thinking ways that anti-slavery activists saturated citizens' consciousnesses with emotional visual pleas such as these. 

Episode Three: Readings and Resources

On abolitionists:  

Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (Da Capo Press, 1991)

Manisha Sinha, The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2016)

In Pursuit of Freedom, exhibition and website curated by Prithi Kanakamedala, as a partnership between Brooklyn Historical Society, Weeksville Heritage Center, and Irondale. 

On silences in the archives:

Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (WW Norton & Co, 2019) 

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon Press, 1995)

More Doc Chat

You asked, we responded! Doc Chat is now a weekly series, taking place on Zoom on Thursdays at 3:30pm. This fall, we'll be covering a range of topics, from Malcolm X, to the 1939 World's Fair, to the 1960s Lower East Side literary scene, and more. Check them out on NYPL's calendar,  and make sure you don't miss an episode by signing up for NYPL's Research newsletter, which will include links to register. A video of each episode will be posted here on the NYPL blog shortly after the program, so be sure to check back regularly to keep on top of the Doc Chat conversation.