Dr. Manish Sinha to Give Black History Month Lecture

by Jaime Bates, student newswriter, (254) 710-6805

Dr. Manish Sinha, associate professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will lecture on "Allies for Emancipation? Lincoln and Black Abolitionists" in honor of Black History Month at 5 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 19, in Kayser Auditorium of the Hankamer School of Business on the Baylor University campus. This lecture, sponsored by the Baylor History Department, is free and open to the public.

Sinha is a participant in the Distinguished Lectureship Program under the auspices of the Organization of American Historians. She received a doctorate in American history from Columbia University in 1994. Her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft Prize and received grants from the National Endowment in the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

Sinha has received faculty fellowships from Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research fellowship from Harvard University, the Rockefeller Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Humanities from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the President's and Whiting Fellowships from Columbia University.

She is the series editor for "Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900" and is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina. Sinha also co-edited African American Mosaic: A Documentary History from the African Slave Trade to the Twenty First Century, Vols. I & II and Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race and Power in American History.

Sinha's research and teaching focuses on 19th century United States history, specifically the history of the south, slavery, abolition and antislavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction. She is currently in the process of writing a book on African-Americans and the movement to abolish slavery.

"Dr. Sinha's lecture will combine the topics of black history month and the Abraham Lincoln bicentennial celebration," said Dr. Ken Jones, assistant professor of history at Baylor.

"The image and memory of Lincoln have played an important part in the recent presidential election and the opening days of the new administration," Jones said. "It will be interesting to see just how Lincoln related to the leaders of the African-American abolitionist movement."

For more information on this lecture, go to www.baylor.edu/history or contact Jones at (245) 710-6299.