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Thomas Healy to Discuss Freedom of Speech

Posted on: October 13th, 2014 by

Professor of Law Thomas Healy of Seton Hall University will present “How Free Is Our Speech,” October 14, 2014 at 4pm in the Overby Center Auditorium.

Professor Thomas Healy writes about freedom of speech, the methods of judicial decision-making, and the role of courts in a democracy. His book The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind – and Changed the History of Free Speech in America won the 2014 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award, and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Award. It was also selected as a New York Times Book Review editor’s choice and was named one of the fifteen best non-fiction books of 2013 by the Christian Science Monitor. He is currently at work on a new book about the civil rights movement, for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Public Scholar Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

UM Journalism Professor Curtis Wilkie Discusses His New Book

Posted on: September 25th, 2014 by

Curtis Wilkie, whose newspaper career spanned nearly four decades before he joined the journalism faculty and became an Overby Fellow at the University of Mississippi, will appear at his campus habitat, the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics, at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 30, to talk about a new collection of his stories with another Mississippi journalist, his friend Charles Overby.

Wilkie’s book, “Assassins, Eccentrics, Politicians and Other Persons of Interest: Fifty Pieces from the Road,” was published this month by University Press of Mississippi. A week after the anthology became available it was listed as the second best-selling book in the state by the Clarion-Ledger.

Overby, the chairman of the university’s center, led the Clarion-Ledger to a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 when he was executive editor of the newspaper. He will conduct a conversation with Wilkie about the craft of writing and the wealth of Mississippi stories which appear in the book.

The event is free and open to the public. Arrangements have been made with university officials to provide free parking for guests in a lot adjacent to the Overby Center.

A 1963 graduate of Ole Miss, Wilkie’s first job was at the Clarksdale Press Register when a “local story” – the civil rights movement – grew into the biggest story in the nation. He spent most of his career as a national and foreign correspondent for the Boston Globe, covering eight presidential campaigns, serving as chief of the Globe’s Middle East bureau in Jerusalem in the mid-1980s and reporting on stories from more than fifty countries. But many of Wilkie’s most memorable articles were set in the South and are included in the book.

The collection contains accounts of Martin Luther King’s last days in the Delta, the trials and convictions of two Mississippi assassins of other civil rights leaders, and the rise of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Trent Lott — as well as profiles of colorful figures from the “Gonzo” writer Hunter S. Thompson to the PLO military leader Abu Jihad.

Writing in the Oxford Eagle earlier this month, editor Don Whitten said the stories “still appear as fresh as the day they appeared.” In a review in the Clarion-Ledger, Sid Salter called the book “one hell of an entertaining read” and said “it is in Wilkie’s nuanced, compelling and enlightening storytelling that the worth of this book is revealed.”

Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics
555 Grove Loop, Suite 247
University, MS 38677

www.overbycenter.org

UM’s Critical Race Studies Group Hosts Beverly Mitchell

Posted on: September 24th, 2014 by

Focusing on slavery and the Holocaust, the University of Mississippi’s Critical Race Studies Group welcomes historical theologian Beverly Mitchell, of Wesley Theological Seminary, to speak Thursday (Oct. 2) evening on campus.

Mitchell, who specializes in systematic theology and church history with an emphasis on issues of human rights, has authored two books, including “Plantations and Death Camps: Religion, Ideology, and Human Dignity.” Her lecture will inquire about opportunities for human dignity and honor in view of grave historical and societal inhumanity, such as that exhibited during U.S. slavery and the Holocaust.

The lecture is slated for 5:30 p.m. Thursday (Oct. 2) at Overby Auditorium, followed by a reception. Both events are free and open to the public.

This program is made possible by the Legacy Heritage Jewish Studies Project, directed by the Association for Jewish Studies. Support for the LHJSP is provided by the Legacy Heritage Fund Ltd.

“This is the second year that the AJS-LHJSP has funded public programming at the University of Mississippi,” said Willa Johnson, co-chair of the Critical Race Studies Group. “The Critical Race Studies Group is pleased for their support, and we anticipate that Dr. Mitchell will further the conversation about race on our campus and in our communities.”

Co-sponsors for the lecture series are the UM Lecture Series, College of Liberal Arts, the African-American Studies Program, William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology.

By Elizabeth Burgreen | October 1, 2014

2014 Gilder-Jordan Lecture Features Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

Posted on: September 23rd, 2014 by

The University of Mississippi’s 2014 Gilder-Jordan Lecture in Southern Cultural History will feature Jacquelyn Dowd Hall on Wednesday, September 24 at 7 p.m., Nutt Auditorium.

Dr. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Julia Cherry Spruill Professor Emeritus, UNC-Chapel Hill, and founding director emeritus of UNC’s Southern Oral History Program, is past President of the Organization of American Historians, the Southern Historical Association, and the Labor and Working Class History Association. Dr. Hall’s research interests include women, labor, and the American South. She is the author of prizewinning books and articles, including Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (1987; coauthor); Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (1979); “Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South,” Journal of American History (1986); and “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (March 2005), now one of the most widely cited and assigned examinations of the movement. In 1999, she was awarded a National Humanities Medal for her leadership of the Southern Oral History Program and her efforts to deepen the nation’s understanding of and engagement with the humanities. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011. In 2013, she received the Mary Turner Lane Award for outstanding contributions to the lives of women at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is currently completing Writing a Way Home: The Lumpkin Sisters, From the Lost Cause to the Popular Front (forthcoming, W.W. Norton).

Organized by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, the African American Studies Program, Center for Civil War Research, and the Department of History, the Gilder-Jordan Speaker Series is made possible through the generosity of the Gilder Foundation, Inc. The series honors Richard Gilder of New York and his family, as well as his friends, Dan and Lou Jordan of Virginia.

Past Gilder-Jordan lecturers have been Barbara J. Fields of Columbia University, David Blight of Yale University, Grace Elizabeth Hale of the University of Virginia, and Walter Johnson of Harvard University. Learn more about past lectures here.

2014 Conference on The Civil War Explores Science, Medicine, and Technology

Posted on: September 18th, 2014 by

The 2014 Conference on The Civil War, “Science, Medicine, and Technology in the Civil War,” will be held October 9-10, 2014. The keynote address will be given by Charles D. Ross of Longwood University. His talk, “Black Powder and the Cannon’s Roar,” will examine a variety of topics ranging from the phenomenon of acoustic shadows to the operations taking place at the Confederate Powder Works in Augusta, Georgia. It will be presented October 9, 2014 at 6:30p.m. in the Overby Center Auditorium. Panel sessions on a host of topics, including changing definitions of metal illness and its treatment, the institutionalization of Union Veterans, the influence of dual revolutions in print and photography, and the dramatic consequences of Union telegraph failures at the Battle of Chancellorsville, will be held all day Friday, October 10, in the Butler Auditorium (Triplett Alumni Center). The Center will also also award the 2014 Wiley-Silver Prize, which recognizes the best first book on the Civil War published in the preceding year, thereby recognizing and encouraging new and emerging scholars in the history of the American Civil War. All events are free and open to the public.

UM Professor Jarod Roll Discusses Faith, Powers, and Gambling Spirits

Posted on: February 18th, 2014 by

On April 9th at noon in Barnard Observatory, Jarod Roll, associate professor of history, discusses “Working-Class Belief and the Creation of Pentecostalism at the End of the Gilded Age.”

Roll, a historian of modern America, specializes in labor and working-class history, the history of religion, and the history of the South. He is the author of Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South (Illinois, 2010), which won the C. L. R. James Award, the Herbert Gutman Prize, and the Missouri History Book Award. Roll is the coauthor, with Erik S. Gellman, of The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America (Illinois, 2011), which won the H. L. Mitchell Award from the Southern Historical Association.