Senior Fellow Katie Peterson talks with Professor Matthew X. Vernon about his book, The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages (2018). A seminar-style discussion with participants will follow.

Since the Revolution, Americans have drawn on the Middle Ages to imagine the nation's place in world history, from Thomas Jefferson's obsession with all things Anglo-Saxon to the poetry and fiction of the nineteenth century (e.g. Walt Whitman's "Song of the Exposition" and Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court), which used the medieval period to understand the ruptures of the Civil War and modern industrialism.

But these American "medievalisms" have often been considered the purview of white writers and thinkers, even a way for such writers to limit Americanness to white, "Anglo-Saxon" racial identity. Less known or understood are the many ways that African Americans like Charles Chesnutt and W. E. B. Du Bois similarly repurposed the heritage of medieval Europe. As Professor Vernon writes, African Americans "also read the texts of the Middle Ages but they approached the study of the Middle Ages as a strange sort of inheritance, one in which they could dimly see the outlines of their own struggles and envision alternative means of reading their existence within the United States."

Why has it been important to Americans to trace their language, culture, and history back to a medieval past? How did Black Americans use that past in their own literary and intellectual work? And what can the relationship between American history and the medieval period teach us about the study of history more generally?

Date: Friday, March 3, 2023

Time: 5:30 - 7pm

Location: Berkeley Institute (2134 Allston Way, 2nd floor)

Participants are asked to complete a short reading before the event which includes an excerpt of Professor Vernon's book and W. E. B. Du Bois's short story, "The Princess Steel." A PDF will be emailed to registered participants before the event.