Telling the Full History Lecture Series
The Telling the Full History speaker series occurred in the fall of 2021 and featured four respected Louisiana historians who presented public programs on Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights history for southern Louisiana with a focus on Iberia Parish. Funded through a Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Rebirth Grant, this series was part of the reinterpretation work the Shadows is undergoing to tell a more complete history of the site and the people who lived, worked, and were enslaved on the Weeks family plantations.
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Dr. Charles Vincent
Dr. Vincent is currently the Louis-Jetson-Lamar Corporation Professor of History at Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge. He is the author of “Black Legislators in Louisiana during Reconstruction and A Centennial History of Southern University and A&M College, 1880-1980,” and co-author of “Images of America: Scotlandville.” Dr. Vincent has been published in numerous professional journals and encyclopedias, presented lectures to a variety of organizations around the country, and served as President of the Louisiana Historical Association.
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Dr. Phebe Hayes
Dr. Hayes, a native and life-long resident of Iberia Parish, is a descendant of West Africans enslaved on plantations in present-day Iberia, St. Martin, and St. Mary parishes, including the Shadows. In 2013, she retired from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where she was a Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences & Disorders and served as Dean of the College of General Studies. In the spring of 2017, she founded The Iberia African American Historical Society with the mission to research, preserve, commemorate, and teach the full and inclusive history of African Americans of Iberia Parish.
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Prof. Kenetha Harrington
Professor Kenetha Harrington is a Ph. D. candidate in Anthropology at Louisiana State University. Harrington has completed archaeological fieldwork at The Hill in Easton, MA and James Madison’s Montpelier. Harrington has worked with Shadows before as the 2019 National Trust for Historic Preservation summer intern where her work focused on connecting enslaved people on the Weeks family plantations to descendants through genealogy research. She was recently contracted to conduct additional research leading to a more comprehensive understanding of the African American experience at Shadows.
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Dr. Ian Beamish
Dr. Ian Beamish is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and currently, Dr. James Wilson/BORSF Eminent Scholar Endowed Professor in Southern Studies. Dr. Beamish's research focuses on enslavement, capitalism, and 19th century United States history. Dr. Beamish organized the successful "Representing Slavery in Public: Louisiana's Past in the Present" conference which featured speakers Dread Scott, LaKisha Simmons, and Ibrahima Seck. He is invested in the local community as a board member for Vermilionville Living History Museum Foundation and an advisory board member for the Iberia African American Historical Society.
This program is funded under a grant from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.