Dr. Kirt von Daacke, assistant professor of history at Lynchburg College, is one of only 35 faculty nationwide accepted for the Gilder Lehrman Institute's Slave Narrative Seminar at Yale University in June 15-18, 2008.
The program is jointly sponsored by the United Negro College Fund and the Council for Independent Colleges. Dr. Julius Sigler, LC's vice president and dean for academic affairs, nominated Dr. von Daacke for the seminar.
The genre of slave narratives is usually divided into three categories: biographies, fiction, and autobiographies. Autobiographies by former slaves were first published in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and grew in scale as new texts were promoted and printed by the early abolition movement in Britain and the United States. This seminar will examine both antebellum and postbellum narratives.
Before the Civil War approximately 65 narratives were published in English, many of them now classics by such authors as Harriet Jacobs, Solomon Northup, and William Wells Brown. The pre-emancipation narratives were often serious works of literature that tended to focus on the oppression of slavery.
The post-emancipation narratives, of which there are approximately 55 in existence, tended to be more success stories-triumphs over the past and visions of a more prosperous future. The most famous pre-war narrative is that of Frederick Douglass, and the most famous post-war narrative is that of Booker T. Washington.