2020-21 Academic Catalog

This seminar explores history and memory as valuable lens to investigate constructions of competing narratives about three figures who loom large in our minds and imagination. Nat Turner, an extraordinary man inspired by religious visions, led what many historians consider to be the most significant slave rebellion in American history in 1831. Booker T. Washington’s ideas about racial uplift dominated African American life in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century. Fannie Lou Hamer emerged from Mississippi sharecropper society to toil for voting rights and economic empowerment throughout the 1960s and 1970s.