| BI-50141-11 | Education Programs: Landmarks of American History for Community Colleges, WTP | Georgia Historical Society, Inc. | African-American History & Culture in the Georgia Lowcountry, Savannah & The Coastal Islands | 10/1/2011 - 12/31/2012 | $161,548.00 | Stan | | Deaton | | | | Georgia Historical Society, Inc. | Savannah | GA | 31401-4889 | USA | 2011 | Interdisciplinary Studies, General | Landmarks of American History for Community Colleges, WTP | Education Programs | 161548 | 0 | 161548 | 0 | Two one-week Landmarks workshops for fifty community college faculty members to explore African-American life and culture in Savannah and Georgia's coastal islands.
"African-American History and Culture in the Georgia Lowcountry, Savannah and the Coastal Islands" consists of two one-week NEH Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshops held during summer 2012 for fifty community college faculty members on African-American life and culture in Savannah and Georgia's coastal islands. By focusing on African Americans in the Georgia lowcountry, this program challenges monolithic views of race and slavery in American history. In particular, the juxtaposition of urban and rural life illustrates a complex story of distinct and enduring African-American cultures. Visits to Sapelo and Ossabaw Islands focus on the lives that developed in the rural communities. The workshop also contextualizes the African-American experience in the Atlantic world, the organic nature of African-American folkways, and the islands' twenty-first century way of life. Savannah, by contrast, elucidates African-American life in an urban setting. Showing, for example, how blacks and whites mingled continuously, reveals how urban slavery was considerably more fluid than its rural counterpart. Participants prepare for the workshop by reading Ira Berlin's Many Thousands Gone. Additional works authored by the visiting scholars include Alexander Byrd's Captives and Voyagers; Cornelia Walker Bailey's God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man: A Saltwater Geechee Talks About Life on Sapelo Island; and Jacqueline Jones' Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War. Time is set aside for primary-source research aided by project directors and research staff, as well as for work on course material. |