I am having consults this week with my capstone research students. Rather than having 2.5 hour class, I am at the stage where I do half-hour check-ins. I love the energy that some bring to their topics. It’s like having mini-classes all week.
It is a longer teaching week but the rewards are many. One student is exploring “leisure” life while Montgomery becomes Alabama’s capital in the mid-1840s. She “gets” how some folks’ lives are conducted in ways that are anything but leisurely. She is a History/Dance major & I could see my prior academic training in dance paying off as I spoke to her about the work of how an antebellum city “becomes” amid so much pain and sorrow but also hope & possibility. Her smile got bigger and bigger. My hands and upper body moved as I spoke. It was not deliberate. It just happened as I tried to offer guidance. She heard me.
I will always treasure these moments with my students – especially the ones who know effort is half the battle. A 15-20 page paper is not easy to write. But after they have done the reading and found some primary sources with some guidance on how historians — including ones with interdisciplinary training — tell stories using as much evidence as possible, they stand to do well. But they must do the work.
Below is a clip of students enrolled in a prior class visiting the University of Alabama’s Hoole Special Collections Library. One of the students is reading a letter that this semester’s capstone class saw me touch last week. It was written by the biracial descendant of a prominent Huntsville planter who is interested in receiving her inheritance from her grandfather. She amazingly wrote Septimus Cabaniss, her now-deceased grandfather’s lawyer, to learn more about how to get this money. The letter shows, as the students continue to learn, how power is always in flux – even in a difficult era like antebellum America.
And here is a clip showing another earlier class probing the possibilities of emerging urban life by walking around Tuscaloosa’s downtown. I really believe the physical body should be part of the learning and teaching experience.
Finally, I am constantly reminded of my how my journey as a storyteller who happens to be a history professor but also an artist and writer include dance. Indeed, the initial impetus for my wanting to go to graduate school involved my desire to explore the trauma in black women’s bodies via exploration of the antebellum period on my own body and those of others. I did so in graduate school at UNC-Greensboro. Below are stills of my 2005 21-minute choreopoem “Makes You Happy.” The choreography embodies some of that trauma but also the resilience that black women/people have no matter what challenges face them.
catalogue, too 
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