A Public Lecture by Professor Vincent Brown (Harvard) – Wars Within Wars: Black History’s Warning to the World

The past several years have witnessed transatlantic efforts to deny and disparage Black perspectives on our common history. This is a denial of our right to critically analyse all of our history from points of view that emerge from a history of enslavement, impoverishment, and racial violence, and that question the customary disavowal that these things constitute fundamental features of the Atlantic experience. Reframing narratives of the Age of Revolution, this lecture highlights the ways in which Black history is world history, and as such it has lessons – and warnings – for the world.

Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (2008) and Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (2020). He is also the producer of Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (2009), an audiovisual documentary broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens, and the short video series The Bigger Picture (2022) for PBS Digital Studios.