Orlando Patterson will deliver the third annual National Italian American Foundation Pellegri Distinguished Lecture at the University of Maryland. Patterson is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. His academic interests include the culture and practices of freedom; the comparative study of slavery and ethno-racial relations; and the cultural sociology of poverty and underdevelopment with special reference to Caribbean and African American youth. The lecture will be followed by a reception.

The biblical passage in the title—quoted by a famous school library leader in a 1979 article—expresses school librarianship's decades-old frustration at being positioned between the education and library professions and having its obvious contributions frequently overlooked and undervalued by both. During his tenure at the Kluge Center, Wayne Wiegand has been researching his current book project—a history of the American public-school library. The project incorporates five perspectives: the history of public-school education; the history of American librarianship; the social history of reading (including the history of print culture); the history of childhood; and the history of cultural institutions as places. […]

This talk will explore how southern black women artfully navigated the US pension bureaucracy to gain recognition as Union widows. Based on extensive research of black soldiers’ wives and widows at the National Archives, Brandi Brimmer will reconstruct the pension application process and evidentiary obstacles newly freed black women faced in their attempt to claim and maintain their position on the pension roster. Over the course of the presentation, she will demonstrate how these women utilized the US pension bureaucracy to air their grievances and remake widowhood on their own terms. Brimmer is assistant professor of history and geography at Morgan […]