Prof Beverly Gage Recasts Legacy of FBI Founder in Carl Becker Lecture Series
History
Prof. Beverly Gage, director of undergraduate studies in history at Yale University, shared insights into the life of J. Edgar Hoover, the first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in the Carl Becker lecture series last week sponsored by Cornell's Department of History.
Gage focused on elements of Hoover’s character and accomplishments that she said are often overlooked.
“One of the things that’s really exciting about the project and about Hoover as a figure is that it takes me in so many different directions,” she said. “It gives me the opportunity to be what I fundamentally am, which is a historian of American politics.”
Devin Flores/Cornell University
Enslavers posted as many as a quarter-million newspaper ads and flyers before 1865 to locate runaway slaves. Ed Baptist is leading the public crowdsourcing project, Freedom on the Move, that has digitized tens of thousands of these advertisements in an open-source site accessible to the public.
