Prize-winning scholar to lecture on African American ideas of work, culture, liberty

Distinguished historian Thomas Holt will deliver the 2006 Merle Curti Lectures, sponsored by the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of History.

Holt’s topic will be “‘Work, Culture, Liberty’: Contesting Jim Crow at the Turn of the 20th Century.” In three lectures, he will analyze how African Americans who came of age in the late 19th century built concepts of work, culture and liberty that aimed to foster black emancipation and “New Negroes” — even as African Americans contended with the violent Jim Crow era. The figures considered will include intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Anna Julia Cooper, as well as other social activists and laborers of the era.

The lectures will be held at 4 p.m. Monday-Wednesday, Oct. 16-18, in the Vandenberg Auditorium (Room 121) of the Pyle Center, 702 Langdon St. They are free and open to the public.

After the Monday lecture, the public is invited to a reception, to be held at 5:30 p.m. in the Pyle Center’s Lee Lounge, Room 109.

Holt is the James Westfall Thompson Distinguished Service Professor of History at the University of Chicago and a former president of the American Historical Association. He is a pioneering scholar of the history of race and the African diaspora, with emphasis on African Americans in the U.S. and African-descent peoples in the Caribbean. His many honors include a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship (commonly dubbed the “genius award”), election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and several prizes for outstanding scholarship. The latter include the 1978 Charles S. Sydnor Prize of the Southern Historical Association for his 1977 book, “Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina During Reconstruction,” and the Elsa Goveia Prize of the Association of Caribbean Historians for his 1992 book, “The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics and Politics in Jamaica and Britain.”

More recently, Holt has published a wide-ranging reflection titled “The Problem of Race in the 21st Century” (Harvard University Press, 2000). Before accepting a position at the University of Chicago in 1988, he taught at Howard University, Harvard University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of California, Berkeley.