On March 15th, 2019, the Slavery and Visual Culture Working Group will hold a special reading group session: Barbara Weinstein (History, NYU) will be conducting a discussion on Frank Tannenbaum’s ideas on slavery systems in the Americas. The meeting will be at Foster 103 (1130 E 59th St.), from 12pm to 1:30pm.

The discussion will focus on three texts: Frank Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (Vintage Books, 1947); Alejandro de la Fuente’s “From Slaves to Citizens? Tannenbaum and the Debates on Slavery, Emancipation, and Race Relations in Latin America” (International Labor and Working-Class History, 2010); and Bianca Premo’s “An Equity Against the Law: Slave Rights and Creole Jurisprudence in Spanish America” (Slavery and Abolition, 2011).

All the texts can be accessed here.

Frank Tannenbaum (1893-1969) was a professor of Latin American history at Columbia University. His most important works include The Mexican Agrarian Revolution (Macmillan, 1930), Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (Vintage, 1947), and Crime and the Community (Columbia University Press, 1938).

Alejandro de la Fuente is a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean who specializes in the study of comparative slavery and race relations. Currently, he is the director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

Bianca Premo is an associate professor of History at Florida International University. She is the author of The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire (2017) and Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (2005). 

Barbara Weinstein is Silver Professor of History and Past President of the American Historical Association. Her publications include The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850-1920 (1983), For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in São Paulo (1996), and The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil (2015).

A light lunch will be served. Should you have any questions, please contact our graduate assistant Isabela Fraga (fraga@uchicago.edu).