LUNCH AND LEARN SPEAKER SERIES
Explore Houston’s History with a historical expert while enjoying your brown bag or ordered lunch from Tres Market Foods. This series of speakers is generously underwritten by a 2025 Donor.
Thursday, January 16, 2025: Andrew “Dru” Sanders, "Texas in the International Civil War"
February 20, 2025: Dr. Caleb McDaniel Black History Month: “Captain’s Story: Slavery and Freedom in the Archives of The Heritage Society and Rice University”
March 20, 2025: Speaker TBD, Topic: Women's History Month
April 17, 2025: Suzanne Simpson, "Wild Houston: A Natural History of the City”
FEBRUARY
At noon, join us and Speaker Dr. Caleb McDaniel for “Captain’s Story: Slavery and Freedom in the Archives of The Heritage Society and Rice University”
In 1997, archivists at Rice University learned of a document which referred by name to a person enslaved by William Marsh Rice, the university’s founder. But it was not until the work of the Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice (2019-2023) that the full significance of the document, held in the archives of the Heritage Society, became clear. In this talk, Prof. McDaniel will return to those archives to examine what they can teach us about the history of slavery, emancipation, and the Civil War era in Houston and its hinterlands, as well as the importance of the institutions that preserve archives today.
Speaker’s Biography
Dr. W. Caleb McDaniel is a historian of the United States. His teaching and research to date have focused on the nineteenth century, the Civil War Era, and the struggle over slavery. He is also co-chair of the Rice University Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice.
His most recent book, Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America, published by Oxford University Press in 2019, was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in History and the Civil War and Reconstruction book prize from the Organization of American Historians. It tells the story of Henrietta Wood, a formerly enslaved woman who, in the twilight of Reconstruction, won the largest known sum ever awarded by a U.S. court in restitution for slavery.
Dr. McDaniel’s first book, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionism and Transatlantic Reform, was published in 2013 and won the Merle Curti award from the Organization of American Historians and the James L. Broussard Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.
His scholarly articles have appeared in the Journal of the Civil War Era, the Journal of the Early Republic, American Quarterly, and elsewhere, and he has published essays in the New York Times, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, and other outlets.
PAST EVENTS
Description: This presentation places Civil War–era Texas in an international perspective. Arguing that trade was the central point of contention in Civil War Texas, the presentation looks to the nexus of that trade, Matamoros, where merchants from Mexico, the US, and Europe competed and collaborated to reap the benefits of wartime border commerce. While distant federal governments found it difficult to exercise their goals on the border, wealthy merchant capitalists successfully juggled the realities of war to profitably participate in the Atlantic trade in cotton grown by enslaved people. For these merchants, loyalty and identity were fluid and contingent on circumstance, and they took advantage of their evolving postures toward different governments. While capitalism generally rests on trust, this one was built on precariousness. The merchant class of Matamoros learned how to thrive in the space between competing legal systems by engaging in shady commerce and seeking state compensation when their bets failed. o About the Speaker: Dru Sanders is a PhD candidate at Rice University. He completed a bachelor’s degree at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and a master’s degree at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont. Before coming to Rice, he taught at the Windward School in White Plains, New York. His research interests include the nineteenth century US, slavery and capitalism, the US-Mexico borderlands, and the Civil War in an international context.
1100 Bagby Street, Museum Gallery. Free Parking at 212 Dallas
Members attend Lunch and Learns for free! Lunches from Tres Market Foods are additional. Membership information here- https://www.heritagesociety.org/membership-join
