The Porch Archives of Black Civil War Memory

Drawing on her research from her recent monograph, Hilary Green explores how the African American porch and other communal archival practices allowed for diverse Black communities to remember the Civil War in complex ways. By engaging with both these communal sites of memory as well as traditional archives, Green offers a new direction for academics and lay communities for deepening current understandings of Civil War memory.

Biography:

Hilary Green is the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham University Press, 2016); Unforgettable Sacrifice: How Black Communities Remembered the Civil War (Fordham University Press, 2025), and the co-edited volume The Civil War and the Summer of 2020 (Fordham University Press, 2024) with Andrew L. Slap.

In addition, she served as the lead historian on the With These Hands: A Memorial to the Enslaved and Exploited and inaugural Oak Row Exhibition focused on the campus history of slavery and post-Civil War experiences at Davidson College. She is also the Chief Reader for the AP US History exam and the co-series editor with J. Brent Morris of the Reconstruction Reconsidered, a University of South Carolina Press book series.