Civil War 150 Lecture Series: Dr. Max Grivno to Present "Rumors of War: Slave Insurrections in Civil War Mississippi"

News item published on: 2013-09-11 14:51:00

University Libraries at the University of Southern Mississippi will sponsor the third in a series of five talks relating to the American Civil War on Monday, September 16, 2013, 6-7 p.m. in the Cook Library Art Gallery (LIB 105A).

"Rumors of War: Slave Insurrections in Civil War Mississippi," by Max Grivno, examines how slave insurrections and rumors of slave insurrections shaped life in the Mississippi Black Belt during and immediately after the Civil War. The talk will explore how these rumors fueled slave resistance and responses of whites to the increasingly restless slave population, and how the violence that erupted during wartime bled into the postwar years.

Max Grivno is an associate professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi. He specializes in the Old South, slavery, labor history, and Mississippi history. Grivno’s first book, Gleanings of Freedom: Free Labor and Slavery along the Mason-Dixon Line, 1790-1860, was published in 2011. He is currently writing From Bondage to Freedom: Slavery in Mississippi, 1690-1865 and is researching another book, Bandits, Klansmen, Rioters, and Strikers: Violence in the Alabama-Mississippi Black Belt, 1830-1917.

In September and October, University Libraries is sponsoring the Civil War 150 Lecture Series. The series focuses on different aspects of the Civil War including the life of the average soldier, African American writer and reformer Harriet Jacobs, food in the Civil War, singing and fiddling by soldiers, and slave insurrections in Mississippi. The talks are made possible by a grant from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, The Library of America, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For more information about this talk or the lecture series, contact Jennifer Brannock at Jennifer.Brannock@usm.edu or 601.266.4347.