Distinguished Lecturers
Jim Downs

In New Orleans in 1973, an arsonist set fire to a bar that gay men converted into a church; 32 men and women were killed and over 40 others were injured. This lecture traces the events that led up to the fire and the group of individuals who perished--who were members of the Metropolitan Community Church and used a bar on Sunday evening as a place of their worship. This was the largest massacre of gay people in U.S. History

In this lecture, Downs argues that Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, did not want to be found, despite the herculean efforts to recover her from the archives and piece together her biography. Downs reveals how Jacobs and her daughter Louisa continued to stay "underground" during the Reconstruction era and during Jim Crow.

This lecture explores the question of same-sex desire and violence among enslaved men in the plantation South from 1607-1865. Drawing on a thin volume of archival records, this lecture also questions how historians evaluate evidence and the methods they employ in writing about the past.

Emancipated from slavery, former bondspeople entered into an environment in which more soldiers died from disease than from battle. This talk explores the high rate of illness and mortality that devastated formerly enslaved people during the Civil War and Reconstruction. In particular, it provides the first analysis of the smallpox epidemic that began in Washington, DC in 1862 and then spread to the Lower South in 1863 and Mississippi Valley in 1864-65. By 1865, the epidemic plagued the entire South and began to move west and infected Native Americans on reservations. Due to the unexpected and inordinate mortality, the federal government in an unprecedented move established the first-ever system of national health care in the South--establishing over 40 hospitals, employing over 120 physicians and treating well-over one million freedpeople.