Back for Spring 2024: Watch. Read. Join Us.
Hard Histories is Back with a Full Season of Programming and More.
who among us can imagine ourselves unimagined? who among us can speak with so fragile tongue and remain proud? - Lucille Clifton, “here yet be dragons.”
At Hard Histories we understand the powerful and necessary role that imagination plays in our research. Not only does imagination permit us to develop new theories about the past, it leads us to search for answers in places that other historians have not yet explored. We also take seriously how those about whom we write — those held enslaved in Mr. Hopkins's household or resident in the hospital's orphan asylum — imagined themselves as whole persons even when other might deny that possibility. Who better than Baltimore's own poet, the late Lucille Clifton, to remind us how imagination is at the core of what makes us human.
UPCOMING WEBINARS
As our Webinar series resumes this spring, we'll ask our guest historians many questions including those about the role that imagination plays in their work. Mark your calendars for these up-coming conversations live from 12 noon to 1 pm eastern time, or catch up later by tuning to our YouTube channel here. We'll remind you here, with links for registration, as the dates draw nearer.
February 21, 2024. “Critical Approaches to Hard Histories in the Archives” with Elizabeth Beckman, Hopkins Retrospective, and Dr. Heather Cooper, Chesney Medical Library.
March 13, 2024. “Slavery and a Shared Past: Loyola University Maryland and Georgetown University” with Dr. David Carey, Loyola University Maryland, and Rachel Swarns, New York University and The New York Times.
April 15, 2024. “Johns Hopkins Alumni Look Back and Uncover Hard Histories” with Dr. Paige Glotzer, University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Dr. Jennie K. Williams, University of Virginia and Kinfolkology.
WHAT WE'RE READING
Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum, from Antonia Hylton: “Hylton tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. She blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family’s experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations.”
How to Lose the Hounds: Maroon Geographies and a World Beyond Policing, from Celeste Winston: “Winston explores marronage—the practice of flight from and placemaking beyond slavery—as a guide to police abolition. She examines historically Black maroon communities in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, that have been subjected to violent excesses of police power from slavery until the present day. Tracing the long and ongoing historical geography of Black freedom struggles in the face of anti-Black police violence in these communities, Winston shows how marronage provides critical lessons for reimagining public safety and community well-being. These freedom struggles take place in what Winston calls maroon geographies—sites of flight from slavery and the spaces of freedom produced in multigenerational Black communities. Maroon geographies constitute part of a Black placemaking tradition that asserts life-affirming forms of community. Winston contends that maroon geographies operate as a central method of Black flight, holding ground, and constructing places of freedom in ways that imagine and plan a world beyond policing.”
WORKSHOPS IN PARIS AND BERLIN
In March, Hard Histories will be convening scholars of France, Germany, and the U.S. in conversations about a hard histories approach to the past. These workshops will hear works-in-progress and also go into the city to examine how museums and monuments are parts of a hard histories landscape. Space is limited at these small gatherings, but colleagues in Paris or Berlin can contact us at hardhistories@jhu.edu if you're able to join us. Thanks to our partners and hosts at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Wiko) in Berlin.
— MSJ.