Dr. Christian Pinnen, Humanities Teacher of the Year for Mississippi College, presents his public lecture:
The date “1619” has garnered more attention than in recent memory over the last couple of months. The year the first enslaved Africans arrived on the shores of the Virginia colony engenders a sort of intellectual reckoning with Americas past and the deep roots of slavery in the history of the country, but it also lays open the fault lines of our public discourse. I want to use this opportunity to talk about the role of the (digital) humanities at large in this debate, how historians include the story of slavery in the production of American history, and the difficulties historians encounter to cement the facts that surround the events in 1619. Engaging the public in a debate about the meaning of race and slavery in United States history is vital, yet controversial even 400 plus years after the first arrival of enslaved people on the Eastern Seaboard.
