Free "Making Gullah" Lecture on November 8, 2019

We are grateful for all the folks who help us bring enlightening, illuminating and informative local history programs to you. Since June, we've collaborated with Beaufort Branch, Beaufort County Historical Society, Beaufort History Museum, Hilton Head Branch, and the Pat Conroy Literary Center on a wide range of topics from bootlegging to teaching kids; from colonial life to Beaufort County in the 1970s; natural disasters and disasters made by humans (Civil War) - and through all those time periods, there were African American people who endured and affected that history. We are delighted to collaborate with the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission, Penn Center, and the St. Helena Branch Library to offer another program about the Gullah people  to you. 

"Making Gullah: Reflections on Finding Gullah Folk in the American Imagination" by 
Dr. Melissa L. Cooper | BDC@ St. Helena Branch Library,  6355 Jonathan Francis, Sr. Road | Friday, November 8, 2019 at 2 PM

Melissa L. Cooper, PhD specializes in African American cultural and intellectual history, and the history of the African Diaspora. She is an Associate Professor in History at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. Cooper's book, Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) is an intellectual and cultural history that examines the emergence of "the Gullah" in scholarly and popular works during the 1920s and the 1930s. Using Sapelo Island, Georgia as a case study, Cooper's manuscript explores the forces that inspired interest in black southerners’ African heritage during the period, and also looks at the late twentieth, and twenty-first century legacies of the works that first made Sapelo Islanders famous. She is the author of Instructor's Resource Manual--Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 2013) and a contributor to Race and Retail: Consumption Across the Color Line (Rutgers University Press, 2015).  

Please join us for this free lecture being held as a component of Penn Center's 37th Annual Heritage Days Festival. 

Also, we do hope that you have reserved your seat at "Guns of the Big Gun Shoot" as registration is required.The link is https://beauforthistorymuseum.wildapricot.org/event-3552471.  Registration is closed once room capacity is met.

As of this writing, there are still seats available for Jim Alberto's Daufuskie Daze Author Book Talk at Beaufort Branch on November 15th: https://daufuskiedaze2.bpt.me.

Looking ahead: The Library system will be closed on Monday, November 11, 2019 for Veterans Day.