About the Book:The 1831 Southampton Rebellion led by Nat Turner involved an entire community. Vanessa M. Holden rediscovers the women and children, free and enslaved, who lived in Southampton County before, during, and after the revolt. Mapping the region's multilayered human geography, Holden draws a fuller picture of the inhabitants, revealing not only their interactions with physical locations but also their social relationships in space and time. Her analysis recasts the Southampton Rebellion as one event that reveals the continuum of practices that sustained resistance and survival among local Black people.
Learn more: https://go.illinois.edu/s21holden
Dr. Vanessa M. Holden (She/Her) is an associate professor of History and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky (UKY). She is also the director of the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Holden’s book, Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community (University of Illinois Press, July 2021) explores the contributions that African American women and children made to the Southampton Rebellion, often called Nat Turner’s Rebellion. Her writing has been published in Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, Perspectives on History, Process: A Blog for American History, and The Rumpus. Dr. Holden also co-convenes #SlaveryArchive Book Club with #SlaveryArchive co-founders Dr. Johnson and Dr. Ana Lucia Araujo (Howard University), and co-convener Dr. Alex Gil (Columbia University). Dr. Holden serves as a faculty adviser on a number of public history and digital humanities projects including Freedom on the Move and The Chronicle of African Americans in the Horse Industry. Follow her on Twitter @drvholden .
About Erica Armstrong Dunbar:
Erica Armstrong Dunbar is the Charles and Mary Beard Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University. She currently serves as the National Director of the Association of Black Women Historians –the only professional organization focused on Black women’s history. Dunbar’s first book, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City was published by Yale University in 2008. Her second book, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (Simon & Schuster) was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and a winner of the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. The young readers version of Never Caught (Aladdin/Simon and Schuster) was published in January 2019. In the fall of 2019, Dunbar published She Came To Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman, an accessible biography of one of the most remarkable social activists of the 19th century. Dunbar’s op-eds in outlets such as the New York Times, The Nation, TIME, Essence, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, her commentary in media outlets such as CNN and the LA Times, and her appearances in documentaries such as “The Abolitionists” an American Experience production on PBS, the History Channel’s biopic of George Washington as well as Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s Black Patriots place her at the center of America’s public history.
