America at 250: Ideals of Freedom and the Black Experience
As the nation commemorates its 250th birthday, two scholars of the Revolutionary era and modern Black politics will examine how the ideals of freedom and democracy expressed by people of African descent during the war live on today.
Assistant Professor of Civil Rights Studies
Allison Mashell Mitchell is Assistant Professor of Civil Rights Studies in the Departments of Africana Studies and American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Mitchell received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia. She received her BA in History and African American Studies at the University of Florida. Her general research interests include African American history, oral history, civil rights studies, political and social movements, and grassroots organizing.
Mitchell's current research project analyzes the role of Black Americans in Florida in political realignment in the South beginning after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1944 Smith v. Allwright ruling. She challenges the traditional periodization and white American-centered narratives of political realignment scholarship by emphasizing points of contention in state-level and Southern politics that reveal the inherent limitations of the U.S. two-party system. Her work has been supported by the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida, the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University, and the Richards Civil War Center and Africana Research Center at Pennsylvania State University.
Mitchell is an avid supporter of public-facing scholarship. Her work has appeared in TIME Magazine. Additionally, her essay, “The Children of the Mississippi Freedom Summer,” was featured in the edited volume Picturing Black History.
Mitchell's current research project analyzes the role of Black Americans in Florida in political realignment in the South beginning after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1944 Smith v. Allwright ruling. She challenges the traditional periodization and white American-centered narratives of political realignment scholarship by emphasizing points of contention in state-level and Southern politics that reveal the inherent limitations of the U.S. two-party system. Her work has been supported by the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida, the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University, and the Richards Civil War Center and Africana Research Center at Pennsylvania State University.
Mitchell is an avid supporter of public-facing scholarship. Her work has appeared in TIME Magazine. Additionally, her essay, “The Children of the Mississippi Freedom Summer,” was featured in the edited volume Picturing Black History.
Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer at the University of Virginia's Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies
Dr. Adam Xavier McNeil is a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer at the University of Virginia's Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies. McNeil is a historian of early African American women's social and political history, especially in the Revolutionary and Founding Eras of U.S. History. He is currently revising his award-winning dissertation into a book, tentatively titled, Contested Liberty: Fugitive Women and the Shadow of Re-Enslavement and Displacement in Revolutionary Virginia. Contested Liberty is under contract with the University of Virginia Press.
Alongside his written work, McNeil is an avid academic podcaster. Since 2017, McNeil has interviewed nearly 120 scholars, thinkers, and writers on the New Books in African American Studies podcast, which is part of the New Books Network. He has also hosted and contributed to numerous other podcasts like the McNeil Center for Early American Studies' Early American Conversations, Ben Franklin's World, a Podcast About Early American History, and Worlds Turned Upside Down.
Originally published at raceandresilience.nd.edu.