General Admission Tickets (book not included)
–Not Yet Members: $10
–Members: $5
–Insiders: Free
Online ticket sales will close at 5pm on the day of the event; however, tickets can still be purchased at the door via credit or debit card only.
Woodruff Auditorium is located inside McElreath Hall. Doors and cash bar will open at 6pm.
Peter H. Wood’s groundbreaking history of Blacks in colonial South Carolina, with a new foreword by National Book Award winner Imani Perry.
First published in 1974, Black Majority marked a breakthrough in our understanding of early American history. Today, Wood’s insightful study remains more relevant and enlightening than ever. This landmark book chronicles the crucial formative years of North America’s wealthiest and most tormented British colony. It explores how West African familiarity with rice determined the Lowcountry economy and how a skilled but enslaved labor force formed its own distinctive language and culture. While African American history often focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Black Majority underscores the significant role early African arrivals played in shaping the direction of American history.
This revised and updated fiftieth anniversary edition challenges a fresh generation with provocative history and features a new epilogue by the author.
About the Author
Peter H. Wood (Duke University), coauthor of Created Equal and Powhatan’s Mantle, has received the American Historical Association’s Distinguished Teaching Award. A Rhodes Scholar and Guggenheim Fellow, his books include Strange New Land and Near Andersonville.
About the Moderator
Frederick Knight is an associate professor in the Morehouse College History Department and specializes in the history of the African Diaspora.
Prof. Knight has chaired the Morehouse history department since 2011 and mentored students who are pursuing graduate degrees in history or careers in various fields. He has served as director of the College’s general education program and helped lead the College’s first major overhaul of its core curriculum in decades.
He completed his Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Riverside, in 2000, where he studied under the late Sterling Stuckey. While working on his doctoral theses, he completed a year of coursework at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana. He has been on the faculty of the University of Memphis and Colorado State University, where he taught courses and conducted research on the history of Africa and its Diaspora. He has also held various research fellowships. He held a dissertation fellowship at the Center for Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a post-doctoral fellowship at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. He was awarded a summer research fellowship at the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization at Brown University. He also held the P. Sterling Stuckey Postdoctoral Fellowship of African-American history at the University of California, Riverside.
He has published a book and numerous articles on the history of the African Diaspora, and his work focuses on the experiences of enslavement. His book titled Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650-1850 (NYU Press, 2010) traces how Africans drew upon knowledge from their homelands to shape the agricultural and material worlds of New World slave labor camps. His current research centers on questions tied to generation in early African-American history, and he has recently published an article on Jarena Lee, the first woman preacher in the AME Church. His newest book, Black Elders: The Meaning of Age in American Slavery and Freedom, was recently published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
The Aiken Lecture Series is supported by the Lucy Rucker Aiken Foundation.
Promotional language provided by publisher.