by Dr. Tyler Parry (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) & Dr. Chaz Yingling (University of Louisville) In accordance with testimonies from many runaways, ex-slave David Holmes from Mecklenberg County, Virginia detailed his own harrowing escape from slavery, recalling how environmental knowledge aided him in successfully evading the bloodhounds used to track him. British journalist L.A. Chamerovzow, who interviewed Holmes in 1852, recorded that such knowledge was “secret” and not “known generally” to protect strategies from prying slaveowners. He thus omitted the type of substance that Holmes used to confuse the bloodhound’s sensory power, saying that it “must remain an editorial secret” and that he would “not betray it, for the benefit of the planters; but it is at the service of friends.” Such covert archives, transmitted through quiet conversations among the enslaved, enabled many across the Caribbean and North America in escaping bondage. Though not all slaves were so secretive in interviews and memoirs, the ubiquity of slave hounds in the rise of slavery and fall through abolition has remained obscured. Holmes’ reference does offer useful insights into how slaves curated knowledge and guarded it from masters. Collectively, the primary sources that remain reveal the terror of slave hounds as […]

by Dr. Dan Callwood, Dr. Craig Griffiths (Manchester Metropolitan University), Dr. Rebecca Jennings (University College London)   Held on 6 December 2019, “Stonewall 50 years on: gay liberation and lesbian feminism in its European context” at Manchester Metropolitan University, attracted scholars from around the UK, Europe and the US, mixing with a large audience of researchers, students, activists and members of Manchester’s queer community. Online discussion around this event has been collated and can be viewed here. June 2019 marked the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City, often credited as the spark that set gay liberation alight, not just in the U.S., but around the Western world. The organisers of this one day conference saw the 50th anniversary as an opportunity to rethink the various gay liberation and lesbian feminist movements that the events at Stonewall supposedly spawned in Europe, asking to what extent they were influenced by their own national events, ideologies and imaginaries, as well as interacting with each other in a network of action and ideas. The conference consisted of four panels. The first, on ‘Protest Repertoires,’ considered some of the ways in which LGBT communities have mobilised political protest in the 1970s to […]