March 18, 2022
MCLA Assistant Professor of History Dr. 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.
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, Dr. 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.
About Dr. Amanda Laury Kleintop
Amanda Laury Kleintop is Assistant Professor of History at MCLA. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University, among others. It has been published in Slavery & Abolition, and she is completing her first book.
About The Mind’s Eye
First founded in 1977 as print publication featuring MCLA faculty’s research and creative projects, The Mind’s Eye has now pivoted to multimodal research and praxis initiative anchored in interdisciplinary academic programming in and beyond the Berkshires. Continuing a tradition of showcasing faculty excellence and expertise, the new direction of The Mind’s Eye includes innovative forums for exhibiting faculty research, such as Works-In-Progress Colloquia and Faculty Book Writing & Publishing Panel Discussion. An incubator for collaborative interdisciplinary projects, like CARE SYLLABUS, The Mind’s Eye is a platform for dynamic partnerships with neighboring institutions such as MASS MoCA. As a research and praxis initiative, The Mind’s Eye aims to expand professional development opportunities and emphasize lifelong learning for faculty and staff.
