OAH Distinguished Lecturer Profile
Daryl Michael Scott is a historian of black-white relations in America since the Civil War, southern history, and African American history. A professor of history at Howard University, he is also the author of Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (1997). He is currently researching a work that reexamines white supremacy and Jim Crow entitled “The Lost World of White Nationalism in the American South,” and is also preparing a collection of essays on the sui generis treatment of nationalism in American historiography.
The lecture makes the case that when slavery is viewed as involuntary servitude, the Thirteenth Amendment neither originated nor perpetuated slavery as punishment for crime in American history, as recent literature in American Studies suggests.