Join us on February 17th at 6:30PM in the Stone Center Auditorium for the 2026 McNeil African American History Month Lecture with Dr. Thavolia Glymph.
Lecture Title: Making “Actual Freedom”: The Civil War and Enslaved People’s Legal Consciousness
Abstract: This talk explores how enslaved people during thew Civil War turned to the legal literary they had built-up during slavery to defend their right to refuge and freedom in Union military lines and forced the federal government to offer itself an “humanitarian shield” and “a sword of justice,” calling on the law as an instrument of that justice.
Dr. Glymph is Peabody Family Distinguished Professor of History at Duke University, Professor of Law and Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, and Faculty Research Scholar at the Duke Population Research Institute. She is a historian of the 19th Century South and prize-winning author of Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (2008) which won the Philip Taft Labor History Award, was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and listed in The Atlantic Magazine as one of “Five Books to Make you Feel Less Stupid About the Civil War;” and The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation published in 2020, which won eight book prizes with awards from the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Southern Association for Women Historians, the Society of Civil War Historians, and the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History, and was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize. She is co-editor of two volumes of the award-winning documentary series, Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 and the author of numerous articles and essays. She is currently completing three book projects.
Glymph is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of American Historians; past president of the American Historical Association and the Southern Historical Association; an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, and a Duke Thomas Langford Lecturer. She held the Rogers Distinguished Fellowship in Nineteenth Century History at the Huntington Library in 2023-24 and the John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of American Legal History at Duke Law School in 2015 and 2018. Honors include the Distinguished Service to Labor and Working-Class History Award from LAWCHA and the Raymond Gavins Distinguished Faculty Award. She has served as a historical consultant for the National Museum of African American History & Culture, the International African American Museum, the National Constitution Center, the National Park Service, PBS documentaries such as Mercy Street and the film, Harriet, and lectured and nationally and internationally.