NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) Assistant Professor of History Laury Kleintop will present "The Balance of Freedom: Abolishing Property Rights in People in the US Civil War and American Memory" at noon on April 5, via zoom.  

 

Presented as part of The Mind's Eye Spring 2022 Works in Progress Lecture Series, this event is free and open to the public. To register, visit https://mindseye.mcla.edu/spring2022. 

 

According to a press release, though enslavement and the trade in Black bodies once existed throughout the United States, Americans often frame slavery as a southern problem. In this talk, Kleintop argues that the nation built this myth after the Civil War during debates over whether to pay former enslavers for the value of freed people. When the Fourteenth Amendment successfully nullified white southerners' claims for compensation in 1868, Americans celebrated immediate, uncompensated emancipation as an inevitable outcome of the war and distanced themselves from the legal and economic legacies of chattel slavery. 

 

This is the third iteration of The Mind's Eye's Faculty Works-in-Progress Colloquium series, in which MCLA faculty members share their current research or creative projects and benefit from questions and discussion.