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Interview on Zoom with MSU Prof. Jeff Strickland about his new Cambridge University Press book, All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849

Posted in: History Department, Homepage News and Events, Religion

All for Liberty book cover

On Thursday, February 17, 2022, from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m., MSU History professor Dr. Jeff Strickland will be interviewed by MSU Religion professor Dr. Kate Temoney about his new book, ALL FOR LIBERTY: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849 (Cambridge University Press, 2021). The Zoom URL for this event is https://montclair.zoom.us/j/82060250036.

10 copies of All for Liberty will be given away in a free raffle to MSU students who attend this event on Zoom.

All for Liberty tells the powerful story of Nicholas Kelly, the enslaved craftsman who led the Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion, the largest slave revolt in the history of the antebellum American South. With two accomplices, some sledgehammers, and pickaxes, Nicholas risked his life and helped 36 fellow enslaved people escape the workhouse where they had been sent by their enslavers to be tortured. All for Liberty centers his rebellion as a decisive moment leading up to the secession of South Carolina from the United States in 1861. This compelling micro-history navigates between Nicholas’s story and the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, while also considering the parallels between race and incarceration in the nineteenth century and in modern America. Never before has the story of Nicholas Kelly been so eloquently told.

Dr. Jeff Strickland is Professor of History and History Department Chair at MSU. He teaches undergraduate courses on the Civil War Era. His first book was Unequal Freedoms: Ethnicity, Race, and White Supremacy in Civil War–Era Charleston (University Press of Florida, 2015.

Dr. Kate E. Temoney is a former Assistant Dean of Students and currently an Assistant Professor of Religion at MSU. She is the co-chair of the Religion, Holocaust, and Genocide Unit of the American Academy of Religion and a co-founder of the Genocide Education and Prevention Project: https://www.montclair.edu/religion/events/genocide-education-and-prevention-project-geapp/. She earned a BA from Wake Forest University, an MEd from The College of William & Mary, and an MA and PhD from Florida State University. Trained as a comparative religious ethicist, she teaches courses on Religious Ethics, the Holocaust, African Religions, Jewish Applied Ethics, Religions of the World, and Religion & Human Rights.

This event is sponsored by the MSU Honors Program; all are invited to attend.

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