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Hundreds of scholars, teachers, and students attend a major conference on the Study and Teaching of Afro-American History at Purdue University.
1983 (Oct)
Hundreds of scholars, teachers, and students attended a major conference on the Study and Teaching of Afro-American History at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. The meeting, which assessed the latest studies and trends in Black American life and history, was sponsored by the American Historical Association and directed by Darlene Clark Hine, a Purdue University history professor. In one of the keynote addresses at the conference, John Hope Franklin, professor of history at Duke University and one of the premiere scholars in Black American history, described a fourth generation of practitioners of Black American historical scholarship. He said the approaches of the recent generation of scholars, “the largest and perhaps the best trained [ever) were greatly stimulated by the drive for equality [during the 1950s and 1960s]." He also said that they had kept the subject "alive and vibrant.” Another keynote speaker, Black American labor historian William H. Harris (also the president of Paine College in Augusta, Georgia), suggested that scholars needed to do “more work” on the Black working class. He also indicated that “the quest for a change in perspective” by historians would "improve overall the range of history and the level of our understanding of the numerous Black experiences that have been lived in America."
References:
- • Hornsby, Alton. Chronology of African-American History: Significant Events and People from 1619 to the Present. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995.