Reconstructing the Black Archive: South Carolina as Case Study, 1739-1895

Taking South Carolina as a case study, this NEH Institute on "Reconstructing the Black Archive" will provide practical advice and tools for writers and researchers who examine Black histories, biographies, and life writing (narratives, gallows literature, fictionalized histories, and other such genres prevalent in the Black Archive), even if their particular subjects are not centered in South Carolina. Because of the unique positioning of South Carolina as the first Southern slave state to secede from the Union, we are in a position to look at how the archival memory needs active reconstruction.