MCC Book Club   Tags: african_american, book_club, family, genealogy, history, slavery  

Kate Mohler

Contact Info

katemohler@mesacc.edu

February 6: Introductory Meeting -   Join us for a book drawing & refreshments

March 6: Discuss 1st half of book

April 3: Discuss 2nd half of book and Heather Andrea Williams Skype chat!

Where: LB300, Southwest Reading Room, Library 3rd Floor

Time: 2:45pm - 4:15pm

Changing Hands Bookstore is offering the MCC Book Club a 20% discount on Help Me to Find My People. The book is also on reserve and can be checked out for three hours in the library.

Join us in person, on facebook, or facetime!

Book: Stumbling on Happiness

March 21: Read to the end of Chapter 5.

April 25: Read to the end of the book.

Where: Red Mountain Library, Willow Building, 2nd Floor

Time: 1:30 - 3:00pm

After the Civil War, African Americans placed poignant "information wanted" advertisements in newspapers, searching for missing family members. Inspired by the power of these ads, Heather Andrea Williams uses slave narratives, letters, interviews, public records, and diaries to guide readers back to devastating moments of family separation during slavery when people were sold away from parents, siblings, spouses, and children. Williams explores the heartbreaking stories of separation and the long, usually unsuccessful journeys toward reunification. Examining the interior lives of the enslaved and freedpeople as they tried to come to terms with great loss, Williams grounds their grief, fear, anger, longing, frustration, and hope in the history of American slavery and the domestic slave trade.

Williams follows those who were separated, chronicles their searches, and documents the rare experience of reunion. She also explores the sympathy, indifference, hostility, or empathy expressed by whites about sundered black families. Williams shows how searches for family members in the post-Civil War era continue to reverberate in African American culture in the ongoing search for family history and connection across generations. (The University of North Carolina Press)

Heather Andrea Williams is professor history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom. She is photographed with the book cover quilt that she designed and created.

image from kalmu.posterous.com

Thank you Judy MacQueen, Maria Salza-Purchine, Liz Murphy, Jayneen Stevens, Nancy Southworth, Reed Smith, Janell Alewyn, Trevor Smith, Megan McGuire, Marie Brown, Serene Rock, Ann Tolzman, Roger Yohe and the CTL for all your efforts in supporting the MCC Book Club.