Colleges, Slavery, & Memorialization provides an opportunity for students to engage with, contextulaize, and contemplate university, local, regional, and American history through an interdisciplinary lens of the social sciences. This course introduces students to the disciplines of socio-cultural history, public history, and historic archaeology and how these scholarships have informed one another in documenting, interpreting, and sharing the connections of enslaved African Americans and American colleges and universities. Students will research public history, public archaeology, and memorialization projects of colleges and universities and related institutions in order to understand and contextualize the campus lands of the University of West Georgia and the history of enslavement in the west Georgia region. In addition, students will be introduced to the university’s Along the Ridge: Reflections on a 19th- Century Cemetery on the University of West Georgia Campus project that seeks to document, understand, and interpret the lives of the enslaved and freed African Americans who lived on and worked the lands of the Thomas Bonner plantation, which became the University of West Georgia campus.

The course "text" will consist of short excerpts from multiple books, articles, websites, and primary documents--this collection will introduce students to the pursuit of historical and cultural discovery and interpretation as an integrated process. For example, archaeological study both respond and contribute to historical and cultural interpretation. Another example, these readings will expose students to public history's reliance on anthropological modes of thinking as it seeks to interpret and memorialize/present historical events and ways of life.

Through class discussions, writing assignments, and examining and evaluating a public project relevant to the course topic students will reflect upon and put to work historical and anthropological knowledge and skills they have learned.

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