Announcing new scholarship by Lisa Monroe: “Making the American Syllabus: Hashtag Syllabi in Historical Perspective” at the African American Intellectual History Society.

Monroe considers self-education practices of African Americans over more than a century, including a discussion of the Women’s 20th Century Club, founded by eighteen African American women in New Haven in 1900, and documented in a manuscript book, “Minutes of the Women’s 20th Century Club” in the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts & Letters (Call Number: JWJ MSS 5).   

Monroe’s essay begins: “Hashtag syllabi such as #FergusonSyllabus and #CharlestonSyllabus assemble critical intellectual resources and promote collective study both within and outside of the academy during this moment of heightened racial tension. The intellectual intervention of these resource lists, primarily initiated by African American scholar-activists, is necessitated by the systemic deficiency of racially inclusive content in America’s public school and university curricula. This effort to identify racially-centered intellectual resources in 2014 is an extension of self-education practices that African Americans have pursued for more than a century.” Read on here: “Making the American Syllabus: Hashtag Syllabi in Historical Perspective.”