On Sept. 6, Professor of History and Department Co-Chair Roy Finkenbine presented his paper on “The Colored Vigilant Committee of Detroit: A Legacy of the Nelson Hackett Case” at the University of Arkansas conference “To Freedom and Back: The Flight, Extradition, and Legacies of Nelson Hackett.” The conference sought to flesh out and contextualize the story of Hackett, the only freedom seeker returned to slavery in the United States under Canadian extradition law. The papers presented at the conference will be published in a book by the University of Georgia Press.

Also, Finkenbine’s review essay of Martha J. Cutter’s volume, The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown was published in the September 2024 issue of The American Historical Review, the premier journal of the historical profession. Recently, a few historians have taken the story of the Black abolitionists beyond the spoken, written and published word into the realm of visual culture. Martha J. Cutter’s volume is a major contribution to this effort, where Brown, a black abolitionist and former slave, used visual culture and performance to fight against slavery on both sides of the Atlantic.