Atop a cabinet, leaning against a wall of Dagmawi Woubshet’s office, is an enlarged framed cover of the May 17, 1963, issue of TIME magazine. Its portrait of writer James Baldwin stares into the room. Woubshet, associate professor of English, gestures to it several times as he talks about his research.
In that TIME cover story, the magazine heralds Baldwin as a leading voice of the Civil Rights Movement. “In the U.S. today there is not another writer—white or black—who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South,” it reads. It’s not surprising then that Baldwin is best known for his 1950s and 1960s essays on race and the black experience in America.
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In "Child of Light," an experimental historical fiction set in 1890s Utica, Jesi Bender-Buell '07 tells the story of a young girl as she tries to understand her world through the interests of her parents: Spiritualism for Mama, electrical engineering for Papa.
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.
