Grivno to Give Mississippi Humanities Council Teacher of the Year Lecture March 21

Tue, 03/08/2022 - 08:25am | By: David Tisdale

Dr. Max Grivno, a University of Southern Mississippi (USM) associate professor of history, will give the Mississippi Humanities Council (MHC) Teacher of the Year Lecture “The Old Slave: History and Memory” on Monday, March 21 at 6 p.m. in the USM Liberal Arts Building, room 108 (Gonzales Auditorium). This event is free and open to the public.

Dr. Grivno’s presentation will trace how Americans viewed old slaves and freed people from the early national period through the mid-20th century. Drawing upon a diverse range of sources, ranging from postcards, sheet music, and children’s books to the personal papers and memoirs of slaveholders, it will detail how Americans’ ideas about these people changed across more than a century.

Each year, the MHC honors outstanding humanities instructors from USM and other colleges and universities in Mississippi through its Humanities Teachers Awards. These awards celebrate Mississippi's humanities teachers and serve to promote the continued interest in the humanities throughout the state.

“My research focuses on the last survivors of slavery in the United States, who passed away in the 1970s and 1980s,” Dr. Grivno explained. “More specifically, it considers how Americans used these people as touchstones to understand the nation's long, tangled histories of racism and slavery.

“But it is more than a study of these last survivors; it is an examination of how Americans had marked the passing of enslaved centenarians from the 1860s onwards, and how they understood these people's very long personal histories within the context of the nation's history.”

For information about the USM History program, housed in the USM College of Arts and Sciences’ School of Humanities, visit School of Humanities | The University of Southern Mississippi (usm.edu).