The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum and the Mid-Hudson Antislavery History Project will host an author talk and signing on Sunday, September 22 with photographic historian Deborah Willis and historian of slavery Barbara Krauthamer, co-authors of Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery. Willis and Krauthamer have amassed 150 photographs – some never before published – from the antebellum days of the 1850s through the New Deal era of the 1930s. Their work provides a perspective on freedom and slavery and a way to understand the photos as documents of engagement, action, struggle and aspiration.
Deborah Willis is curator of African American photography and culture and chair and professor of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She has been a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fletcher Fellow. Barbara Krauthamer is assistant professor of History at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and has received fellowships and awards from the Association of Black Women Historians, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Stanford University, the University of Texas at Austin, Yale University and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
The program will begin at 2 p.m. in the Henry A. Wallace Visitor and Education Center. Following the presentation, professors Willis and Krauthamer will be available to sign copies of the book at the New Deal Store. Attendees can visit the Library’s new permanent exhibition after the program free of charge. The event is free and open to the public.
Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum is located at 4079 Albany Post Road in Hyde Park. For more information, call (800) 337-8474 or visit www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu.
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