October 6   Omar Wasow
Ph.D. Candidate, Harvard University
Racial Disorder: Violence and American Democracy in Transition, 1954-2000

From roughly 1940 to 1970, many measures of black economic, political and social progress showed rapid improvement and steady convergence with those of whites. From about 1970 onwards, however, despite the passage of historic civil rights legislation, indicators of progress for the poorest-third of African Americans flatlined and, in some cases, even reversed. In particular, two measures of the worsening condition of black life, incarceration and homicide victimization, began to skyrocket. This talk will explore why violent crime began increasing in the late 1950s, started decreasing in the early 1990s and how those trends may have contributed to "law and order" policies become salient in the mid-1960s.

LATER THIS MONTH:

October 13  Sophie Oldfield
Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Science, University of Cape Town
"The Heartbeat of a Brave Community": Cape Minstrels, Community Activism, and the Politics of Research in Post-Apartheid Urban South Africa

October 20  Selwyn R. Cudjoe
Guest Lecturer and Professor and Chair of Africana Studies, Wellesley College
Caribbean Visionary: A. R. F. Webber and the Making of the Guyanese Nation

October 27  Louis Wilson
Professor of African American and American History, Smith College
Black Patriots in the American Revolutionary War from Rhode Island: The History of Over Seven Hundred Men, Using the Microsoft Access Database System and Primary Documents