Jeff Forret | |
---|---|
Born | 1972 (age 48–49) Calamus, Iowa, USA |
Spouse(s) | Sharon Hord Forret |
Relatives | Monica Forret (sister) |
Awards | Frederick Douglass Prize Leadership in History Award |
Academic background | |
Education | B.A., 1995, St. Ambrose University M.A., 1998, University of North Carolina at Charlotte PhD, 2003, University of Delaware |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Lamar University James Madison University |
Jeff Forret (born 1972) is an American historian and professor at Lamar University.
Forret was born in 1972 [1] in Calamus,Iowa [2] to parents Jim and Velma Forret. [3] He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from St. Ambrose University and his Master's degree from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte before enrolling at the University of Delaware for his PhD. [4] His older sister Monica Forret is also an academic,working as a professor of Business Administration and Managerial Studies at St. Ambrose University. [5]
Upon earning his PhD,Forret accepted adjunct instructor positions at Vance–Granville Community College and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte before joining James Madison University as a visiting assistant professor. [6] He spent two years at James Madison before joining the department of history at Lamar University as assistant professor in 2005. [7] Following his first year at Lamar,Forret published his first book Race Relations at the Margins:Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside with Louisiana State University Press. The book focused on the relations between rural poor whites and enslaved people from 1820 and 1860. [8]
From 2009 until 2015,Forret held the rank of associate professor in the Department of History. [6] During this time,he published his second book Slavery in the United States as part of the "Issues and Controversies in American History" series. The book was focused on the roles slaves and the slave trade played in American history,such as the American Revolution and the creation of the U.S. Constitution. [9] Upon his promotion to full professor in 2015,Forret published two books:Slave Against Slave:Plantation Violence in the Old South and the co-edited anthology New Directions in Slavery Studies. [10] His book Slave Against Slave:Plantation Violence in the Old South won the 2016 Frederick Douglass Prize for "the best book written in English on slavery or abolition", [11] was a finalist for the Harriet Tubman Book Prize, [12] and was an honorable mention at the PROSE Awards in the U.S. history category. [13] In 2015,Forret received the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Research Fellowship to research his fifth book Williams’Gang:A Slave Trader,His Cargo,and Justice in the Old South. [14] A Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities in March 2016 also supported that project. [15]
Forret was named University Scholar Award winner for 2016, [16] and Distinguished Faculty Research Fellow from 2016 to 2019 and again from 2019 until 2021. [17] He published Williams’Gang:A Notorious Slave Trader and His Cargo of Black Convicts in 2020. The book explores Washington,D.C.,slave trader William H. Williams and one shipment of enslaved convicts he carried into New Orleans,a story that he links to the modern mass incarceration of African-Americans in the United States. [18] It won the 2021 Leadership in History Award in the large press category from the American Association for State and Local History. [19] Forret delivered Lamar University's 34th Annual Distinguished Faculty Lecture in March 2021. [20]
Forret and his wife Sharon have one son together. [21]
Louisiana or La Louisiane (/lwi.zjan/) (French) is a state in the Deep South and South Central regions of the United States. It is the 19th-smallest by area and the 25th most populous of the 50 U.S. states. Louisiana is bordered by the state of Texas to the west, Arkansas to the north, Mississippi to the east, and the Gulf of Mexico to the south. A large part of its eastern boundary is demarcated by the Mississippi River. Louisiana is the only U.S. state with political subdivisions termed parishes, which are equivalent to counties, making it one of only two U.S. states not subdivided into counties. The state's capital is Baton Rouge, and its largest city is New Orleans.
Baton Rouge is the capital city of the U.S. state of Louisiana. On the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, it is the parish seat of East Baton Rouge Parish, the most-populous parish in Louisiana. Since 2020, the city of Baton Rouge has been the 99th-most-populous city in the United States, and second-largest city in Louisiana after New Orleans. It is also the 18th-most-populous state capital. At the U.S. Census Bureau's 2020 tabulation, Baton Rouge had a population of 227,470; the consolidated population of Baton Rouge was 456,781 in 2020 The city of Baton Rouge is the center of the Greater Baton Rouge area, the second-largest metropolitan area in Louisiana, with a population of 870,569 as of 2020, up from 802,484 in 2010.
Louisiana State University is a public land-grant research university in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The university was founded in 1853 in what is now known as Pineville, Louisiana, under the name Louisiana State Seminary of Learning & Military Academy. The current LSU main campus was dedicated in 1926, consists of more than 250 buildings constructed in the style of Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, and the main campus historic district occupies a 650-acre (260 ha) plateau on the banks of the Mississippi River.
The Known World is a 2003 historical novel by Edward P. Jones. Set in Virginia during the antebellum era, it examines the issues regarding the ownership of black slaves by both white and black Americans.
The Shaw Center for the Arts is a 125,000 square foot performing art venue, fine arts museum, and education center located at 100 Lafayette Street in downtown Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It opened in 2005. The Center includes the LSU Museum of Art, the LSU School of Art Glassell Gallery, the 325-seat Manship Theatre, classrooms, Tsunami, a rooftop sushi restaurant, and a park. Among other collections, the museum includes the largest assemblage of Newcomb Pottery in the United States.
James Henry Hammond was an attorney, politician, planter, and slave owner from South Carolina. He served as a United States Representative from 1835–36, the 60th Governor of South Carolina from 1842–44, and United States Senator from 1857 to 1860. He was considered one of the major spokesmen in favor of slavery in the years before the American Civil War.
Louisiana was a dominant population center in the southwest of the Confederate States of America, controlling the wealthy trade center of New Orleans, and contributing the French Creole and Cajun populations to the demographic composition of a predominantly Anglo-American country. In the antebellum period, Louisiana was a slave state, where enslaved African Americans had comprised the majority of the population during the eighteenth-century French and Spanish dominations. By the time the United States acquired the territory (1803) and Louisiana became a state (1812), the institution of slavery was entrenched. By 1860, 47% of the state's population were enslaved, though the state also had one of the largest free black populations in the United States. Much of the white population, particularly in the cities, supported slavery, while pockets of support for the U.S. and its government existed in the more rural areas.
Edward Seidel is an American academic administrator and scientist serving as the president of the University of Wyoming since July 1, 2020. He previously served as the Vice President for Economic Development and Innovation for the University of Illinois System, as well as a Founder Professor in the Department of Physics and a professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was the director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Illinois from 2014 to 2017.
Sean Eugene Reilly is an American businessman and former politician who is CEO of Lamar Advertising Company in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and a former member of the Louisiana House of Representatives.
A plantation complex in the Southern United States is the built environment that was common on agricultural plantations in the American South from the 17th into the 20th century. The complex included everything from the main residence down to the pens for livestock. Southern plantations were generally self-sufficient settlements that relied on the forced labor of enslaved people.
Poor White is a sociocultural classification used to describe economically disadvantaged Whites in the English-speaking world, especially White Americans with low incomes.
Manuel Barcia is Chair of Global History at the University of Leeds, in the United Kingdom.
Jonathan H. Earle is an author, historian, professor, and dean. He is an historian of American politics and culture who focuses on the early republic and antebellum periods, especially the antislavery movement and the sectional crisis leading up to the Civil War. Currently Earle serves as Dean of the Roger Hadfield Ogden Honors College at Louisiana State University, a post he has held since 2014.
Slavery as a positive good was the prevailing view of white Southern U.S. politicians and intellectuals just before the American Civil War, as opposed to seeing it as a crime against humanity or even a necessary evil. They defended the legal enslavement of people for their labor as a benevolent, paternalistic institution with social and economic benefits, an important bulwark of civilization, and a divine institution similar or superior to the free labor in the North.
Maurie D. McInnis is an American author and cultural historian. She currently serves as the 6th president of Stony Brook University.
They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South is a nonfiction history book by Stephanie Jones-Rogers. They Were Her Property is "the first extensive study of the role of Southern white women in the plantation economy and slave-market system" and disputes conventional wisdom that white women played a passive or minimal role in slaveholding. It was published by Yale University Press and released on February 19, 2019. For the book Jones-Rogers received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Merle Curti Social History Award from the Organization of American Historians.
William Caleb McDaniel is an American historian. His book Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for History. He is also an Associate professor of History at Rice University.
Joshua Daniel Rothman is an American historian. He is a professor and chair for the department of history at the University of Alabama.