President-Elect of the American Historical Association to Speak at USA

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Posted on October 25, 2022

Joy Washington

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Legendary historian Dr. Thavolia Glymph, whose research focuses on slavery, emancipation plantation societies and economies, gender and women’s history, and the era of Reconstruction, will serve as the University of South Alabama’s 2022 Stallworth Lecture speaker at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 27, at the MacQueen Alumni Center Ballroom. This annual event is free and open to the public.

Glymph, president-elect of the American Historical Association and the Peabody Family Distinguished Professor of History at Duke University, will share her historical expertise during her lecture, “I have done his washing and cooking: The Political Vocabulary of Free People.”

“Dr. Glymph is a renowned American historian,” said Professor and Chair Dr. David Messenger of the Department of History in the College of Arts and Sciences. “We are honored she will share her historical perspectives from her extraordinary research.”

Glymph is the author of the award-winning volume, “The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation,” published by the University of North Carolina Press. Her book has won numerous prestigious awards and distinctions including the Albert J. Beveridge Award and the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association and the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians.

Her first book, “Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household,” published by the Cambridge University Press was the 2009 co-winner of the Philip Taft Labor History Award and a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. She is also co-editor of two volumes of the award-winning documentary series, Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867.”

Glymph, president-elect of the American Historical Association, has received a National Institutes of Health Grant as she completes a book manuscript on African American women and children refugees in the Civil War. She is an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Antiquarian Society, and a member of the Scholarly Advisory Board of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

She also serves on the Board of Directors for the Gettysburg Foundation and the Executive Board of the Society of American Historians, and serves as a member of numerous other distinguished historical organizations.

Glymph’s work has been featured on NPR, PBS, and the BBC, and in the New York Times and other publications. 

The Stallworth Lecture, which is named after N. Jack Stallworth, is an annual event supported by the University of South Alabama Foundation. Stallworth was also known as Mr. Mardi Gras. He was a Mobile native who owned and operated many business ventures in Mobile. Stallworth was instrumental in founding Distinguished Young Women, the Mobile Chapter of the English-Speaking Union and the Camellia Ball. 

He funded two scholarships for students majoring in history with a focus on Southern history at South Alabama. The Stallworth family home and contents were left to the USA Foundation to be used to teach Southern history and support programs of USA.

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